Why ~ was chosen as the home directory?
When watching a Youtube video on bash scripting randomly, I came across the fact that the tilde (~) is used to represent the home directory in Unix-like operating systems. Not something that I didn't know, but what was more interesting in the information shared was, that in the old days, the ~ and the HOME keys were on the same key on the keyboard.
Well, that's certainly not the case anymore. Home is a separate key and ~ is on the top left. I went on a search. Fortunately, others got the answers before me.
Terminal, TTY and ADM-3A
When vim was created, it was designed to be used on a terminal. The terminal that was used was the ADM-3A. The keyboard they used was still QWERTY, but some of the other keys were different. Take a look at the keyboard below.
ADM-3A Keyboard Photo from Unix Stack ExchangeHere is a schematic of the keyboard.
Schematic ADM-3A Keyboard Photo from Unix Stack ExchangeA couple of changes to notice are, in the top right corner, there was the HOME key, used to move the cursor to the beginning of the line (it still does). But it was with the ~ key, so it was chosen to use the ~ key to represent the home directory of the user.
A practice in webservers, is to use a directory in the format of ~username to represent the directory of that user, for eg. ~janedoe would point to the web server directory for the user janedoe
I think you can still see the webserver directory in the format of ~username in some places, but it is not as common as it used to be, however a lot of academia websites for universities still use this format.
Esc sits where the modern day TAB key is, thus Esc was far more accessible and was used to switch modes in vim.
Vim and hjkl
Coming to Vim, notice the hjkl keys in the schematic. They have the symbols for the arrow keys! Hence they were chosen as the movement keys and the same stuck. Thus hjkl was used to move the cursor in vim. Rest is history.
I think a lot of interesting history is lost in the world of computers. I think it is important to know the history of the things we use, so that we can appreciate them more.