Preview, the Mac app people forget about

It's usually that all of the pages are consistently oriented as portrait, but some of them actually have landscape content.

The incorrect portrait page orientation was probably done on purpose to keep printers from screwing it up, and rotating a piece of paper to look at it barely requires a thought. No big deal if you're printing it.

But the ease of looking at a single page sideways and then going back to the original rotation doesn't map to reading it on a computer screen with document-wide rotate commands, and they really should've sucked it up and let me fix individual pages. Even if it's a temporary "view" change and not something I can save back to the file.

The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to remember. It's not an obvious hotkey and nor is it even memorable that the hotkey even exists. There's no UI hints that it does. And when you use hundreds of different pieces of software every day, from CLI tools to complicated desktop applications, there's no way anyone can remember every single hotkey and flag for them. This is why tools like fzf and sophisticated shell auto-completion exist. They've at least recognised that this stuff needs to be discoverable somehow.

In fact that is my biggest annoyance with Apple's UIs. There's so much hidden functionality that is almost impossible to discover (and a lot of it is incredibly easy to forget again too). For example I was using an iPhone for years before I discovered you could move the caret by long pressing on the space bar. Before then I was cursing how much easier it was to edit text in Android because I just assumed there wasn't a precise way to move the caret in iOS. I felt like such an idiot that it took an internet meme to teach me to use my phone...but then I remember that it shouldn't have taken a meme to make people aware that feature existed.

> "Show hidden files” is a preference you can change.

I don't want to change a preference. I want to be able to view hidden files on demand. Most of the time hidden files are better off hidden. That's actually an example of sensible defaults. However it's also useful to be able to toggle them on from the open dialogue when needed.

> Once you’re comfortable with the CLI and know the paths you care about for a task, in what cases do you prefer a GUI open dialog on other systems?

It's the other way around, I grew up on text only systems and had to learn to adapt to GUIs. I still struggle with them even now (which is why I hate it when you're expected to stumble upon functionality by chance).

As for when I prefer to use the GUI open dialogue? It's when I'm already using the GUI for something. Like emails, spreadsheets, word processing. Boring stuff we all wish we didn't have to do but cannot escape completely. I'd rather not have to context switch away from the GUI and back into iTerm just to open a file.