Change environment variables as standard user

Solution 1:

Just type “environment” into the start menu (or press Win+S in Windows 10 and search for “Edit environment variables for your account”).

Similarly, searching for “environment” in the control panel yields that option, too.

Generally, I have noticed that simply searching for something in the start menu or control panel is much faster than trying to remember a series of icons, dialogs, etc. one has to access to find something. At least for the vast majority of tasks¹.

A little digging yields that

rundll32 sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables

is the command used to present that dialog. You can put a shortcut to that somewhere if you like.

¹ There are exceptions, such as installing a loopback network adapter. I looked for a few minutes before finally finding how to do that. But those things are hardly common scenarios :-)

Solution 2:

In addition to searching (as Johannes mentioned), "Change my environment variables" is listed under "Tasks" on the "User Accounts" control panel.

From the command line, you can create/modify persistent environment variables using the setx command, which is included in Windows Vista (and presumably Windows 7 too) and was part of the Windows Resource Kit Tools before that.

Solution 3:

It is possible with the Rapid Environment Editor.

Solution 4:

In case you wish to edit an environment variable for a particular account but that variable is a part of system variables (which might be the case if you are setting path for a particular plugin) e.g. Path in Windows, you can achieve this by appending a semi-colon, if required, followed by %variable_value% like so:

Path=%Path%;c:\PathName\ForNewPlugin