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> `~` is harder to search for, as well as not on all keyboards. Which keyboards do not have a '~' key? How do those people type a path relative to their home d
by phaer 12y ago
> `~` is harder to search for, as well as not on all keyboards.
Which keyboards do not have a '~' key? How do those people type a path relative to their home directory? Use $HOME/foo/bar all the time?
- jontro 12y agoMy swedish mac keyboard layout forces me to use Alt ¨ + space to type ~. It's certainly annoying and I usually just type "cd" first.
- pavlov 12y agoMany international keyboards don't have a tilde key. For example it's not shown on the Finnish/Swedish MacBook Pro keyboard at all. It's not difficult to type (Alt+¨ followed by a space), but you can't find it by looking at the keyboard.
- moogly 12y agoThat's a specious argument IMO. The same case can be made for the pipe/vertical bar character. So I guess they have to remove that from the language too so Mac users won't be mildly inconvenienced.
- jeltz 12y agoYou do not have to type a space though to get a pipe character. Tilde and backtick are the two characters which are hardest to write on a Swedish keyboard.
- moogly 12y agoI actually use a Swedish keyboard and I've never found these dead keys to be a problem myself. Vertical bar/pipe isn't shown on most European Macbook keyboards, nor is backslash in fact, so I guess backslash has to be removed too. I'm just saying it's not a great argument.
- steveklabnik 12y agoCheck it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Keyboards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Keyboards
- masklinn 12y ago> Which keyboards do not have a '~' key? Most euro keyboards need at least AltGr + key, possibly 2 keys (because ~ is a dead key, so a space is needed to insert the character itself) > How do those people type a path relative to their home directory? Use $HOME/foo/bar all the time? It's common to `cd; cd foo/bar`
- luchs 12y agoThese keyboards usually don't have a convenient way to type {}[] either, these are AltGr + number keys in the German and French layouts for example. The keyboard situation doesn't seem to be as bad as for the degree sign °, which doesn't seem to be typeable on an English keyboard at all.
- simlevesque 12y agoFrench layout keyboards do have a convenient way to type {}[], for me with Canadian French it is under 7890 using alt.
- Solarsail 12y agoFrench Canadian keyboards are fairly different from European French keyboards: French Canadian: http://www3.uakron.edu/modlang/french/images/kbd4.gif http://www3.uakron.edu/modlang/french/images/kbd4.gif European French: http://www.fentek-ind.com/images/frenchkeytop.gif http://www.fentek-ind.com/images/frenchkeytop.gif
- dbaupp 12y agoNot being able to type those symbols causes problems with almost all programming languages (i.e. programmers are likely to have customised their keyboards for those symbols), but ~ is really only a major problem for Rust (and maybe bit-fiddling in C).
- kps 12y agoIt is not 1974, and people are not limited to typing the characters molded into the type wheel and keytops at the factory. At the moment, it's as easy for me to type × or † as it is to type + or _, and I would happily make it as easy to type λ or ← to get the benefit of reading code as such. The situation with ~ is simpler; it's used by plenty of programming systems today, and any programmer who uses it and can't type it as easily as on a default US keyboard (i.e. with one modifier+key press) is not using their tools effectively.
- ksenzee 12y agoI rarely use ~ for my home directory, and I type on a US keyboard. ~/ is three inconvenient keystrokes; cd<Enter> is three convenient keystrokes.