Change the default location of Pycharm Project

I know this is an old question, but is is certainly possible as of now

Settings | Appearance & Behaviour | System Settings | Default directory

See JetBrains support page

I haven't found an explicit option for doing this in PyCharm, but the following steps have worked as an alternative:

• Move your PycharmProjects folder to the desired location.
• When you create a new project, press the "..." button to the right of the path (This is on the pop up window that asks for location and interpreter).
• Navigate to the new location of PycharmProjects and select that directory.
• Add the name of the new project to the directory location (ie. /home/alex/Documents/PycharmProjects/new_project_name)

Now, whenever you create a new project, the location will default to the last chosen path.

This wouldn't be a good solution for someone who is creating projects in many different directories, rather than just PycharmProjects. All my projects are within PycharmProjects and this works just fine.

In fact, this is possible. In the IDE settings folder (https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/project-and-ide-settings.html), under config/options/recentProjectDirectories.xml, you can add an option lastProjectLocation. It wil honor this setting when creating new projects. My recentProjectDirectories.xml looks like this:

<application>
  <component name="RecentDirectoryProjectsManager">
    <option name="lastProjectLocation" value="$USER_HOME$/my_projects" />
  </component>
</application>

In fact, for most options that you want to customize, you could do a diff of the config/options folder before and after you make the change: this way you can find out a lot about how PyCharm (or any IntelliJ tool) configures its editor.