but there is no equivalent for the second config file “kdiff3staterc”.
How can I move it to the same dir as .kdiffrc3?
Can Kdiff3 not simply search at first for both config files in its own application directory by default?
And only if there are NO such files search in user home files?
Writing to the installation location is traditionally considered problematic.
The user might not even have permissions to write to that location
If there is more than one user account they would start overwriting each others files or the second user might not be able to write at all
So each operating system defines “user writable locations” for all kinds of types of data, e.g. config, cache, application data and so on.
Which apparently on Windows is the path you are getting by default.
However, one could probably modify KDiff3 such that it handles both files at the same location.
So that if you override the path of the main config, the secondary file appears next to it as it would when standard paths are being used.
I am on my own Win10 system. I am the one-and-only user on this system.
I have full access to all my non-system partitions+directories (such as kdiff3).
I guess this scenario is the general case in 99% of all (Windows) systems.
So it should be possible (at least) by an additional user option to read + write automatically all files from KDiff3 installation directory.
If a user does not like this he simply don’t need to enable this option.
I am not sure about your statement:
“one could probably modify KDiff3 such that it handles both files at the same location”
Is this a suggestion to an individual user or a feature request for future release?
If this first: Where do I have to change this PATH exactly?
Config handling is done as much as possible in shared libraries to achieve consistency. Ideally the same as most applications on a platform but at least within the product range of a single vendor.
An operating system specific override of the platform’s standard behavior is difficult to argue with library maintainers. In this case either with Qt (which determines the standard paths in a platform specific way) or KConfig (which handles the actual file contents).
So this would likely have to be an application specific change. No idea whether the KDiff3 team could be persuaded to add it given that config handling is something they usually don’t have to care about.
This is something that could be made as a suggestion to the KDiff3 developers with a higher chance of it getting done.
It likely makes sense from a consistency point of view to have both files at the same location.
On Linux it would even be something that a user can do because the standard path for config files can be set via an environment variable ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME)