For anyone else like me who didn't know about this \\?\ syntax:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21194530/what-does-mean-w...

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Node uses the Unicode functions so no need, but lots of tools in windows break (cmd.exe notably) so things like child processes don't work on long filepaths. You can actually watch `npm` write to files past the limit by using the Unicode functions, but trying to access them via child processes generally fails (and things like IDEs can't see them). The other problem is that using the longer paths turns of filepath expansion.

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

I posted this in the comments in the blog as well:

With regards to the technicalities of max_path itself... the issue is with the .NET file I/O API, which doesn't allow you to use \\?\ paths to work around it, and is too big for our team in particular to do much about. Here's a good article that might provide a little more context (it's a little old, and these "plans" they speak of never actually materialized.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-path...

That said... we don't like it either, and we are still thinking about what we can do.