Spaces in appium tool path

Windows , when installing the tool gets put into “c:\Program Files\appium” - any idea why the target location cannot be changed? My remoting tools are not handing this space very well when remotely starting the server. This is such a common automation tool snafu, surprised there are no docs on how to work around this problem.

Am I the only user who is facing this hard install location curiosity? I’ll be fixing my toolchain, but keen to know if I’m missing an obvious workaround which will get me going quickly. My toolchain works fine with appium on the unixes, so this is yet another appium surprise.

Hmmm turns out the getting started guide is not very clear.

  1. if you install on windows for single/multi user only, it installs to C:\Program Files\appium
    Else it installs to C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Appium\
  2. When you run “appium.exe”, it runs the great big gui, which is not helpfull because I need to spawn node in my framework - which is not installed by appium in the same location anymore. If I reverse engineer, I get this commandline:

c:\Appium\node.exe C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Appium\resources\app\node_modules\appium\build\lib\appium.js -a 127.0.0.1 -p 4001 --no-reset

Or is it that i actually have to use npm - at which point I’ll have 2 copies surely?

Which feels a bit too fragile, once again, would like to know if I am once again barking up the wrong tree.