CWindowswinini

CWindowswinini is not an official Windows term; in practice it appears in codebases and documentation as a generic name for components that interact with Windows INI configuration files, most commonly the win.ini file in the Windows directory.

Historically, win.ini (and its counterpart Windows.ini) stored many system and application preferences in early Windows versions. As Windows evolved, the registry became the preferred central store, and INI files became largely vestigial. Nevertheless, some applications still read and write INI files for compatibility or lightweight configuration.

The INI format consists of sections in square brackets, followed by key=value pairs. Semicolon starts a comment line. On Windows, the APIs GetPrivateProfileString, GetPrivateProfileInt, and WritePrivateProfileString are used to access INI data; there are also corresponding Unicode variants.

In code, a C++-style wrapper class named CWindowswinini or similar is sometimes created to encapsulate loading, querying, and persisting settings from a specified INI file. Such wrappers hide the low-level WinAPI details and provide typed getters/setters.

Today, INI-based configuration is largely supplanted by the registry or modern file formats like JSON, XML, or YAML. However, INI files remain in use by some legacy software and certain Windows components for backward compatibility. The exact file path for win.ini may be C:\Windows\win.ini, or the application may bundle its own ini.