Why was '~' chosen to represent the home directory?

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/34196/why-was-chosen-to-represent-the-home-directory

by ptwobrussell • 13 years ago

62 17 13 years ago

unix.stackexchange.com

I would like to see a re-emergence of this keyboard design, with some added modern enhancements like function keys, command/control/option/etc. modifiers, and media keys.

csense• 13 years ago

Some programs from that era have keyboard shortcuts that were comfortably done on those ancient keyboards, but are unnatural enough to cause injuries on modern keyboards [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_pinky

Crito• 13 years ago

In practice I suspect this tends to manifest itself as hassle, as the user remaps their keyboard, rather than damage to the user's hands. At least I hope so.

Somewhat related: Long term Vi use has caused my standard right hand position to shift one key left. I don't even use hjkl that much anymore, but Vim (and probably more than a little nethack) have changed how I touch-type with QWERTY.

derekp7• 13 years ago

I don't have this issue with VI, but I do have that problem with FPS games that use the wasd keys -- I can only use them if I move my left hand to the left one key space. So I end up remapping those control keys one to the right, in games where that is possible.

lalos• 13 years ago

also known as path dependence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependency

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

I recently noticed that the Macbooks' Japanese Keyboard Layout is surprisingly similar to these Terminal keyboard layouts. I wonder why this is?

https://discussions.apple.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/...

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

$ is on 4 and ¥ way off to the right on the Japanese keyboard?

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

~, Ctrl, @, etc.

chattoraj• 13 years ago

Speaking of the ¥, notice how it's right under the |?

Early Japanese codepages put ¥ where ASCII has the backslash. Even today, on most (if not all) OSes render the \ as ¥ when using the Japanese locale.

Further reading: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.as...

gus_massa• 13 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090344 (405 points, 307 days ago, 157 comments)

CodyJung• 13 years ago

Oh! Is this also why, when using git, HEAD~1 and HEAD^1 are equivalent? Or is it coincidence that they're on the same key?

mstromb• 13 years ago

Git was released in 2005, so while it's probably not a coincidence it most likely has nothing to do with a keyboard from the 70s.

djur• 13 years ago

HEAD~1 and HEAD^1 are equivalent, but HEAD~n and HEAD^n aren't.

HEAD~n means "the n-parent of HEAD, always choosing the first parent." So HEAD~3 means the first parent of the first parent of the first parent of HEAD.

HEAD^n means "the nth parent of head". git commits can have multiple parents if they are merges. So HEAD^3 means the third parent of HEAD.

As a result, HEAD~1 means "the first parent of HEAD" and HEAD^1 means "the first parent of HEAD", but the 1 means two completely different things.

The gitrevisions manpage is pretty mindblowing: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gitrevision...

UNIXgod• 13 years ago

I'd be more interested on why the control key was removed from the home row to help out those who where too lazy to use the shift key or macro a simple translit to their workflow: tr 'a-z' 'A-Z'

When the datamining show is over let me know. I'm in need of a well paying position and interested in moving out to california. I can teach shell automation, programming paradigms and productive workflow to eager learners new to the UNIX programming environment, hacking and building their own tools.

jaryd• 13 years ago

also interesting: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...

Why was '~' chosen to represent the home directory?

Related Stories