"Apple, it just works"
People, we might have misinterpreted the "just"!
"Apple, it only works [the way Apple meant for it to work]"

And I'm just fine with that.

@helloworld Whatever rows your boat. I'm not anti apple users nor anti apple, it's just not working at all for me. And I've used it two years.

I mostly use OSX as a Linux machine I don't have to configure.

No joke. Everything works the way it's supposed to out of the box, and after installing a package manager I never have to leave the console.

All the tools I use in Linux are available for me in OSX in one form or another.

Sure I don't have as much freedom in terms of customisation, but that's not really important if all you need is a reliable platform to write code on.

@ElectricCoffee IIRC I had to press space after ~ for it to appear as a real tilde in the terminal? I quit at Mountain Lion though. But then, typing ~/ would give a different tilde, as if placed on top of a real char. It did not expand to $HOME.

@Gauthier that's because you had it as a dead character, it appears that way on some layouts. My tilde doesn't behave that way. Some windows layouts have a dead tilde too, it's not unique to mac

@ElectricCoffee I'm pretty sure it was on the US layout, but it's true that I had multiple layouts and that it was buggy as hell. (known bug from Tiger until Lion, that they tried but failed to fix in ML. How much time in between, like 4 years? It couldn't consistently remember which application had which layout. I don't know the status since then.)
The tilde as dead character despite selected US layout (but other layouts selectable) could be related.

@ElectricCoffee and even if that is a probable reason, it couldn't be unfixable? I mean the use case "user with dead tilde layout types ~/ and expects it to expand to $HOME" is not so far fetched, is it?

@ElectricCoffee (I've used bash in Windows, and never had the issue)

@Gauthier again, never had the problem