No, not for an alias. It is for copy& paste and adjusting the very last part.
Using the . instead of the ~ has the advantage: you can choose which folder should be examined, but you have to remember that being somewhere in some random data folder, using the one-liner or the alias would not give you the recent changes of ~ …
In my "help.find" help script with some Dr. Copy & Mr. Paste lines also uses the "." variant.
