Windows: ~ symbol not treated as home when starting from CLI/terminal

[devindang]

Problem

any path including "~" cannot be operated correctly.

nvim ~/.vimrc

This doesn't work, and it will create a new file.

cd ~
nvim .vimrc

This get worked.

Steps to reproduce

just install neovim
and execute nvim ~/.vimrc

Expected behavior

It should edit the .vimrc file instead of creating a new one.

Neovim version (nvim -v)

0.9.1

Vim (not Nvim) behaves the same?

no, vim 9.0

Operating system/version

Windows 11

Terminal name/version

windows terminal 1.16.10262

$TERM environment variable

powershell

Installation

scoop

[lewis6991]

Your shell should be expanding ~, I don't think neovim should expand internally.

[devindang]

Your shell should be expanding ~, I don't think neovim should expand internally.

Is that expanded by the shell? But vim could process with it.

[lewis6991]

I'm pretty sure neovim should process the argument names verbatim on the command line.

[devindang]

I'm pretty sure neovim should process the argument names verbatim on the command line.

Yes, it didn't happen on WSL.

[justinmk]

vim special-cases this on Windows. That was removed in Nvim. You can force the special-casing by using the :next command:

nvim +"n ~/.vimrc"

[devindang]

vim special-cases this on Windows. That was removed in Nvim. You can force the special-casing by using the :next command:

nvim +"n ~/.vimrc"

Yes, it does get worked, but if nvim could treat this special case in windows, it will be better :)

[justinmk]

Does any other tool work like that on Windows?

[pjschinske]

Does any other tool work like that on Windows?

Powershell supports tilde expansion for built-in commands, and for native applications if you enable an experimental feature. But third party applications presumably have to implement it on their own.
See https://github.com/orgs/PowerShell/discussions/15263

[devindang]

Does any other tool work like that on Windows?

I didn't find yet. A similar situation occurs with wildcard symbol * in powershell :)

[3N4N]

I think "it would be better" is unarguable. But as lewis said, the responsibility of expanding symbols falls on the shell. And ~ is not a valid symbol in Windows lexicon anyway. Try nvim %userprofile%\.vimrc from command prompt. It will expand correctly. That's on (the responsibility, I mean) command prompt. If we wish to use sane things like ~ in Windows, then instead of patching all apps individually, we should patch the shell. Isn't PowerShell open source now? We should tell them to expand ~ before passing them to app arguments, like normal shells.

[daviewales]

In PowerShell <= 7.3, the problem of tilde expansion is somewhat mitigated by tab expansion which automatically replaces the tilde with the absolute path to your home directory when you press Tab.

nvim ~/Des<TAB> -->
nvim C:\Users\example\Desktop\

In PowerShell Core (7.4 in my case), Tab expansion autocompletes directories, but retains the tilde, and passes it unchanged in arguments.

nvim ~/Des<TAB> -->
nvim ~\Desktop\

See related PowerShell issue: PowerShell/PowerShell#20750.

There is an experimental feature in the pre-release version of PowerShell 7.5 which performs ~ expansion at the shell level if enabled, but it's not enabled by default, and 7.5 is not yet released.

It would be nice for Neovim to special-case ~ expansion on Windows at least until ~ expansion lands as a default feature in PowerShell.

[justinmk]

Thanks for that info. If powershell is gaining this feature then we definitely don't need to special case it.

[jadczak]

Does any other tool work like that on Windows?

For what it's worth (and apologies for being late to the party)

sublime handles the tilde expansion.
So I can type the following to open my init.lua in powershell 7.4.2
subl ~/AppData/Local/nvim/init.lua

However python does not handle the tilde expansion, so trying to run the following:
python ~/foo.py
will result in No such file or directory as python will interpret this as a relative path.

And the direction of the slash (\ vs /) doesn't impact the results. I guess powershell already manages that.

[justinmk]

And the direction of the slash (\ vs /) doesn't impact the results.

It matters almost nowhere, except in a few specific, old console (cmd.exe) commands.

[rkitover]

I started working on a PR for this.

I will put my notes from it here as well.

PowerShell on Windows recently removed the feature where arguments such as ~/.ssh/config or ~/.vimrc are expanded to ${env:USERPROFILE}/.ssh/config etc..

What this means is, in PowerShell, when you run a command such as:

nvim ~/.ssh/config

, what happens is that nvim tries to open ${PWD}/~/.ssh/config because that looks like a relative path to a literal ~ directory to it.

In these cases the user is very unlikely to want to open a file in literal ~ relative directory. It's a huge annoyance for me in PowerShell because I run these commands frequently and now I have to run a command such as:

nvim (gi ~/.ssh/config)

, instead to get the file I want.

There used to be an experimental feature for this in get-experimentalfeature that you could enable, I don't remember which exactly, but it has been removed.

In the unreleased development version of PowerShell, which may not be released for quite a while yet, there is an experimental feature for this, PSNativeWindowsTildeExpansion, see here.

I believe it would be better if we address this in neovim, because this PowerShell experimental feature will not be available for a while yet, and when it is it would require enabling it, and if this is done in neovim it would also work in WinPS (powershell.exe) and cmd.exe.

I should also mention that the PowerShell completion behavior for tilde paths has also recently changed. Before, when you would type:

nvim ~/.ssh/config<TAB>

, it would expand to the absolute path, but PowerShell no longer expands tilde paths to absolute paths, it expands them to canonical tilde paths, leading to the behavior in neovim that I described.

I tried to do this in os_open() in os/fs.c first, but it is too late to do it there because fix_fname() has already converted the path to an absolute path to a relative ~ directory, this is why I put it there.

[T-727]

Note that as of 2 days ago, ~ is expanded for native commands PowerShell/PowerShell#21529.
And that is also considered for backport to the current release of powershell.