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A tilde appears on the terminal if the file contain less lines than the screen currently displays. I was wondering if it is possible to remove them or replace them with something more beautiful (maybe a single line of underscores or something)

Here is an empty file full of tildes on a new vim without even a vimrc: Here is an empty vim window with the ugly tildes

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    Welcome to Vi and Vim! I believe based on :help filler-lines that these are hard-coded in the source, but I can't find a reference on that
    – D. Ben Knoble ♦
    Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 16:58
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    Also if someone with higher score see this: I believe I put a wrong tag as there where no tags about cosmetics ,I would propose one
    – Spyros Mourelatos
    Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 17:36
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    The best tag I could find is margin and the handful of questions associated with it do suggest, IMO, that it's appropriate (though maybe not perfect).
    – B Layer
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 2:32

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Since 8.2.2508, you can hide the tilde by setting the 'fillchars' option:

let &fillchars ..= ',eob: '

Credit to Yegappan Lakshmanan for submitting the PR #7832.

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  • I will change my accepted answer as this one is a little bit more accurate(even though Quasimodos answer was fine for non-opaque terminals and Matts answer was very similar but neovim specific)
    – Spyros Mourelatos
    Commented Feb 15, 2021 at 7:27
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I'm with Ben here: The tilde seems to be hardcoded. However, you can set their foreground color to match the background color so that they effectively disappear:

:hi EndOfBuffer ctermfg=black
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To be fair, in Neovim you can.

set fillchars+=eob:*

Also to note :h 'fillchars' in Neovim is local to window.

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