How to prevent Arduino IDE from moving sketch into new directory?

Question

I have a few sketches I'd like to distribute together. All of them use a custom library which resides in the same folder. The current directory structure is totally flat. All .ino files are in a single folder, right next to the .cpp and .h files for the library. This makes it easy to distribute and update.

This would work perfectly, except that each time I open one of the sketches to upload, the Arduino IDE forces me to move it into a subfolder, then it can't find the custom library. Is there any way to disable this behavior, or can anyone suggest a workaround? Thanks!

Answer 1

I tried at first to do all flat and found it never ending battle. Rather than always working around that, I work with it. My example.

Where I have my local repo in some arbitrary location, then have symbolic links in the ./arduino/library/. directory pointing to them appropriate directories in the repo. In the example I have symbolic links for both SdFat and SFEMP3shield in the ./library/. directory. I use windows so rather than links (or the ln -s command) I use "hard junctions".

Note the libraries use a directory structure of ./ardunio/library/foo/example/bar/bar.ino. So I actually do all my projects in the ./example/bar/bar.ino sketch. Also its worth noting that I use an external editor (like notepad++).

This way my repo can have more or less of what I specify it to.