Tilde ~

• Approximately: ~5 minutes, ~$200. Common in notes, chats and technical writing. In formal text, write “about,” or use ≈ in math.
• Home directory: on macOS, Linux and other Unix-like systems, ~ is your home folder, so ~/Documents is the Documents folder inside it.
• Bitwise NOT: in C, Java, JavaScript and Python, ~x flips every bit of an integer.
• Version ranges: in npm, ~1.2.3 allows patch updates (1.2.x) but not minor ones.
• Statistics: X ~ N(0, 1) means X follows a standard normal distribution.
• Old personal web pages: addresses like example.edu/~jsmith pointed to a user’s own page on a university server.

As a diacritic, the tilde sits on top of a letter: ñ in Spanish (año, jalapeño, piñata) and ã or õ in Portuguese (São Paulo). These are separate letters, not a tilde typed next to n.

• Mac: press Option+N, then the letter. Option+N followed by n gives ñ.
• Windows: hold Alt and type 0241 for ñ or 0209 for Ñ on the numeric keypad. The US-International keyboard layout also lets you type the tilde key and then n.
• iPhone and Android: long-press n and pick ñ.

Look-alikes: ˜ (small tilde) is a spacing accent mark, ∼ (tilde operator) is a math symbol, 〜 (wave dash) marks ranges in Japanese, and ≈ means “almost equal to.”

On US keyboards, the tilde shares a key with the backtick at the top left, below Esc. Press it with Shift. The key is in the same place on Mac and Windows keyboards.

In Markdown with GitHub-style extensions, tildes around text produce strikethrough. If a line like ~10 to ~20 people comes out crossed through, put a backslash before each tilde or wrap the text in a code span.

In URLs, the tilde is an unreserved character, so it never needs percent-encoding, although some older tools still turn it into %7E.