Rapid Environment Editor: Cleanup Paths

If you install or update a lot of software and developer SDKs on your computer, pretty soon you end up with duplicate path values in your environment variables, especially for PATH. Recent versions of Rapid Environment Editor (a must-have tool) have a cleanup feature that makes removing these duplicates easy. Right-click on any environment variable and you will find Cleanup paths there in the menu. This removes empty and duplicate path values from the variable.

Tried with: Rapid Environment Editor 6.1 Build 794

PowerShell: Viewing Environment Variables

In the Windows command prompt, environment variables could be viewed by using the set command. In PowerShell, all the environment variables are available on a PowerShell drive named Env:

To list all the environment variables and their values:

$ Get-ChildItem Env:
$ dir Env:

To display the value of a specific environment variable, for example the PATH environment variable:

$ $Env:PATH

Tried with: PowerShell 2.0

Rapid Environment Editor

Rapid Environment Editor (RapidEE) is one of those tools that should have been included with Windows by default. It displays the contents of the Windows environment variable as a tree, making it super-easy to examine, add or remove entries. It also verifies the validity of all paths and marks the invalid ones in red, so that the user can fix or remove those entries.

RapidEE is extremely useful if you do any kind of tweaking or programming on Windows. You will need to muck around adding or editing environment variables and RapidEE makes all of this a breeze. Start using RapidEE and I guarantee you that within a month you will not even remember the Windows dialog for viewing and modifying environment variables!

Tried with: Rapid Environment Editor 3.3

Windows Environment Variables in Vim

All the Windows environment variables are read by Vim and they are available in Vim as Vim environment variables. Vim environment variables begin with the character $. Hence, the Windows environment variable name is prefixed with the $ character when it becomes a Vim environment variable.

For example, the Windows environment variable %USERPROFILE% will be available as $USERPROFILE inside Vim.

Windows: Vim $HOME

On Windows, the $HOME environment variable in Vim is set to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%.

Reference: init_homedir() in misc1.c in the Vim source code.

ViM: View Environment Variables

ViM has its own internal environment variables, like $VIM and $VIMRUNTIME. Use the echo command to view their values:

:echo $VIM
:echo $VIMRUNTIME

CUDA: Environment Variables

I wiped my Windows XP setup for a new install of Windows 7 today. In the spate of reinstallation of software that followed, I had to install NVIDIA CUDA SDK 2.3. I noticed that NVIDIA has changed the name, number and location of their CUDA SDK environment variables.
Here are the variables for my installation to C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA SDK directory:

CUDA_BIN_PATH=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA Toolkit\bin
CUDA_INC_PATH=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA Toolkit\include
CUDA_LIB_PATH=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA Toolkit\lib
NVSDKCOMPUTE_ROOT=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA SDK
NVSDKCUDA_ROOT=C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA SDK\C