Hey,
I’ve been thinking of that for a while. My Blender is quite heavy as I like to play with many addons. Especially different renderers that make Blender very slow to start and laggy to use. Which is bad for modeling which I spend most of my time on. On top of that my job is Blender all day so I’d like to split that into 2 versions if possible, one modeling that remains clean with few plugins, one bloated version for trying render engines, physics and all.
You can add a folder called portable in the blender app folder, alongside the blender.exe file.
Any config changes and addons will be saved into that folder instead of the user config folder.
I use the environment variable BLENDER_USER_RESOURCES to set where my alternate configuration lives. It’s easy then keep a minimal setup there.
Thanks to both of you I’ll look into these solutions
So basically to translate that into something more new user friendly on Windows one could create a shortcut with a command similar to this:
powershell -Command "$env:BLENDER_USER_RESOURCES='C:\Users\-\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\5.2 Default\'; start 'C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 5.2\blender-launcher.exe'"
And of course here the - in C:\Users\-\AppData\... is my Windows user name, you would probably replace it to yours, or choose another location. I just like to keep them where they are kept in %appdata%\Blender Foundation\Blender
…and then give it the icon from blender.exe and of course name the folder whatever makes sense and that shortcut would start Blender with that user preferences folder every time.
Thanks for posting that Martin. I tried several times, after consulting the manual over and over, to be able to create more than one preference folder for identical version numbers of blender.
Always completely failed in this. So glad to read your post. 
It’s been trial and error for myself as well, I tried using app templates… just don’t work as they should. Not a good or convenient user experience at all. This seems to work. I only started to use this recently myself. Glad if it’s useful.
I mean I said it as if it’s something I invented. But I think I can recommend it, that’s what I meant. It seems to be convenient.
Hey the environment variable was the way. Thank you all!
