Two user accounts using the same home folder

There is no way to make two separate accounts use the same user folder. As to whether there's some software to change those settings based on your location, I don't know. You'll probably get better results on that question by asking it on a topic with a subject specific to that question.

You might be able to write an Applescript or Automator wworkflow (or perhaps a pair) to swap the two sets of preferences and settings.

You do NOT want to even try to do that...

Your much better off finding a way to share the specific settings you want to share, but not the whole user folder. If you were more specific in what you were wanting to do, someone here might know a way.

There is no reason for having the same home folder for two or more users, but—if you wish to have common settings—you may save system settings, and then reimport them for others users. Many backup apps can do that, I currently use iBackup, but you may use any capable of saving sys settings; check with macupdate.com by typing something like ‘backup’ in the search area.

You want one user with two different 'profiles', basically.

Well, all those settings that you want are contained in plist files, so you'd need to make two sets of plist files and find a way to swap between them. Duplicating the files would be easy enough, but someone more technically proficient than I would have to suggest how you could tell the OS which one to load/not to load.

Sounds like a good project for an app store app, actually!

ZooCrewMan wrote:

. . .

So, I figured the easiest was would be seperate user accounts, "Home" "School" "Work" etc., and all have different settings, but still point to the same Home Folder.

The problem is, most of those settings are kept in the home folder.

You could probably do what Softwater suggests, with an AppleScript, or perhaps an Automator workflow, but it's not without some serious downsides. You'd need one for each setup.

At least one complication would be, any change you wanted to make to each setup would have to be done to that script; you couldn't just drag something into (or out of) the Dock.

Another theoretical possiblility would be to have separate user accounts, but use the special Shared user folder for your data. You'd have to select it as a souce or destination for each app you use, but many will remember that from use to use.

The complication would be permissions. When you save a document there, the user that saved it is the owner, with read & write rights. All other users have read-only rights, so could view and open them, but not update them. You'd probably want to create one or more sub-folders in the Shared account (for various types of files), and you could probably set a Folder Action on each to grant read & write permissions to anything created in them.

Then you could set up the desired network location, Dock, and Desktop for each user account.

If we insist to find a solution, then one may think at using the Shared folder as a common folder of all users. This is not exactly what the initiator of this thread wished, but may be close to that intention.