Microsoft is introducing a new keyboard shortcut in the File Explorer of Windows 11, using the « ~ » character to allow users to access their user folder and other directories more quickly. This feature is currently being tested in the preview version of the operating system, with users able to type « ~ » in the address bar to directly access their user folder. The « ~ » character can also be used to navigate through the folder structure, such as « ~\Downloads » for the downloads folder and « ~\AppData » for the AppData folder, avoiding the need to type long paths such as « C:\Users\username\AppData ». The « ~ » character is a convention familiar to macOS and Linux users, where it has been used for several decades to denote the user's personal directory. In Unix-type systems, « ~ » is an alias that represents the personal directory of the current user, and when placed at the beginning of a path, it avoids having to type the entire first part. For example, ~/Downloads directly refers to the Downloads folder of the current account. In Windows, the « ~ » shortcut is being integrated into File Explorer's address bar, which requires modifying the address bar parser to transform « ~ » into a valid path before navigation. This is different from how PowerShell interprets « ~ », which is already recognized as a shortcut to the personal directory. In contrast, File Explorer handles the address bar with a different logic, mixing Win32 paths, internal URLs (shell:), and Windows-specific shortcuts. It should be noted that Windows already had other ways to reach the same result, starting with the %USERPROFILE% variable. However, the « ~ » character offers a more concise input alias, whose support depends on the application (File Explorer, PowerShell, etc.). Both « ~ » and « %USERPROFILE% » aim at the same location but do not follow the same interpretation mechanisms. « %USERPROFILE% » is a Windows environment variable that contains the full path to the user's profile and is mainly used in contexts that interpret variables, while « ~ » is a shorter input alias.