Change the location of the ~ directory in a Windows install of Git Bash

I'd share what I did, which works not only for Git, but MSYS/MinGW as well.

The HOME environment variable is not normally set for Windows applications, so creating it through Windows did not affect anything else. From the Computer Properties (right-click on Computer - or whatever it is named - in Explorer, and select Properties, or Control Panel -> System and Security -> System), choose Advanced system settings, then Environment Variables... and create a new one, HOME, and assign it wherever you like.

If you can't create new environment variables, the other answer will still work. (I went through the details of how to create environment variables precisely because it's so dificult to find.)

I don't understand, why you don't want to set the $HOME environment variable since that solves exactly what you're asking for.

cd ~ doesn't mean change to the root directory, but change to the user's home directory, which is set by the $HOME environment variable.

Quick'n'dirty solution

Edit C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile and set $HOME variable to whatever you want (add it if it's not there). A good place could be for example right after a condition commented by # Set up USER's home directory. It must be in the MinGW format, for example:

HOME=/c/my/custom/home

Save it, open Git Bash and execute cd ~. You should be in a directory /c/my/custom/home now.

Everything that accesses the user's profile should go into this directory instead of your Windows' profile on a network drive.

Note: C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\profile is shared by all users, so if the machine is used by multiple users, it's a good idea to set the $HOME dynamically:

HOME=/c/Users/$USERNAME

Cleaner solution

Set the environment variable HOME in Windows to whatever directory you want. In this case, you have to set it in Windows path format (with backslashes, e.g. c:\my\custom\home), Git Bash will load it and convert it to its format.

If you want to change the home directory for all users on your machine, set it as a system environment variable, where you can use for example %USERNAME% variable so every user will have his own home directory, for example:

HOME=c:\custom\home\%USERNAME%

If you want to change the home directory just for yourself, set it as a user environment variable, so other users won't be affected. In this case, you can simply hard-code the whole path:

HOME=c:\my\custom\home

In my case, all I had to do was add the following User variable on Windows:

Variable name: HOME
Variable value: %USERPROFILE%

How to set a Environment Variable (You can use the User variables for username section if you are not a system administrator)