Every once in a while I get a wild hair and decide that I need to ‘clean up’ my directories. This never ends well and I almost always mess up something, but I still do it.
Why? I’m not sure, except that I forget that I’ll screw it up. 🤦♂️
Anyway, on a Saturday morning when I had nothing but time I decided that I’d move my PyCharm directory from /Users/ryan/PyCharm to /Users/ryan/Documents/PyCharm for no other reason than because.
I proceeded to use the command line to move the folder
mv /Users/ryan/PyCharm/ /Users/ryan/Documents/PyCharm/
Nothing too big, right. Just a simple file movement.
Not so much. I then tried to open a project in PyCharm and it promptly freaked out. Since I use virtual environments for my Python Project AND they tend to have paths that reference where they exist, suddenly ALL of my virtual environments were kind of just gone.
Whoops!
OK. No big deal. I just undid my move
mv /Users/ryan/Documents/PyCharm/ /Users/ryan/PyCharm
That should fix me up, right?
Well, mostly. I had to re-register the virtual environments and reinstall all of the packages in my projects (mostly not a big deal with PyCharm) but holy crap it was scary. I thought I had hosed my entire set of projects (not that I have anything that’s critical … but still).
Anyway, this is mostly a note to myself.
The next time you get a wild hair to move stuff around, just keep it where it is. There’s no reason for it (unless there is).
But seriously, ask yourself first, “If I don’t move this what will happen?” If the answer is anything less than “Something awful” go watch a baseball game, or go to the pool, or write some code. Don’t mess with your environment unless you really want to spend a couple of hours unmasking it up!