aToad #25: Rapid Environment Editor

A user-friendly GUI to edit Windows’s environment variables

A dozen years ago, some guy decided he couldn’t stand Windows’s default, painful environment variables editor and created this program, Rapid Environment Editor (or “RapidEE”), with a really nice interface to edit environment variables. It’s been regularly updated since then, and even though Windows 10 significantly improved the default UI for editing environment variables, it’s still quite superior IMO.

Notably, it provides a usable browsing interface when adding a folder to the PATH env variable (I just tried this with Win 10’s native UI, even with the improvements it’s hell, and I accidentally overwrote another folder name – I was able to cancel, though), and it highlights in bold red whenever an env variable points to a folder that no longer exists. If you start it as non-administrator, you’ll only be able to edit your user variables, but there’s a convenient button to directly restart RapidEE as Administrator.
Among the extra goodies, the website provides downloads for many older builds, in particular builds of the last versions that supported Windows NT/2000 and Windows 95/98/ME, and the software is available as a portable version, which consists of just a .exe file with a companion rapidee.ini.

Development seems to be pretty slow nowadays, but it’s simply feature-complete… It makes sense to have just some maintenance and translation updates.