How to disable tilde (~) expansion? #25483

What is happening (PowerShell 7.5+ on Windows): since 7.5-preview.3, tab completion expands a leading ~ to $HOME (see about_Tab_Expansion). That is separate from the parser's runtime ~ — home expansion for PowerShell commands (about_Parsing), and from the experimental PSNativeWindowsTildeExpansion feature, which extends runtime expansion to native commands on Windows.

There is no preference variable to switch the completion-time expansion off. Your options:

1. Disable-ExperimentalFeature PSNativeWindowsTildeExpansion, then start a new session — but only if the completion behavior on your build is still gated by that flag. Tradeoff: it also turns off the runtime ~ expansion for native commands (the feature's actual purpose), and it does not touch the parser's built-in ~ handling for PowerShell cmdlets.
2. Version-independent and guaranteed (same idea as in 7.4.0 Breaking Change: Tab expansion no longer converts tildes to full paths, breaking path passing to executables on Windows #20750): override TabExpansion2 in your profile and rewrite the completion results — e.g. swap your home path back to ~ before returning them.
3. The "leave my ~ alone" scenario is a known gap — see Tab completion replaces tilde with full path #20033 (tab completion replaces tilde with full path). Worth upvoting/commenting there with your history-preservation use case.

Notes: Windows PowerShell 5.1 has none of this completion expansion, so behavior differs by edition. If you share your $PSVersionTable.PSVersion and the output of Get-ExperimentalFeature PSNativeWindowsTildeExpansion, I can narrow down whether (1) or (2) applies to you.