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Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

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Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#51

Post by Someone »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #31
GiorgioG wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s complaining…because he sells a solution to this problem. I hated Finder when I switched to Mac back in 2007. So much so I bought PathFinder. One thing that pissed me off and still does, is when I copy over a folder with the same name, it doesn’t merge the contents, it deletes everything in the existing folder. That’s not what I expected as a Windows user and it still seems like the wrong behavior almost 20 years…

If you do option while moving the file it merges both directories but even I didn't know this until I googled it.

If you copy-paste a folder using the keyboard, a dialog pops up asking you whether to merge the contents. Totally inconsistent with drag-and—drop, but useful to know.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#52

Post by coffeesoda »

I agree! I've been building this alternative file browser called 'Overlap' which uses Mac's tagging system. Mainly for images. It suggests tags based on Apple's photo classifier & similarity to your own tags. You can also explore data using a visual Venn Diagram. https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/Overlap

By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#53

Post by jakevoytko »

muppetman wrote: post #28

As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn. Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol

This was my instant reaction when I started using a Mac. But 15 years later, even knowing more tricks for interacting with it, it still baffles me. Once you've used Windows Explorer and a few Linux distro navigators, there's no denying that Finder is unquestionably worst in class.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#54

Post by everyone »

muppetman wrote: post #28

As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn. Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol

Imo tech companies want people to be as tech-illiterate as possible. Tech illiterate people will not realise how the tech company did extra work to make their product less capable and less empowering to the user in favour of being more beneficial and empowering to the tech company itself.

Obfuscating the file system has been a popular move in this regard. A file system is so elegant and empowering and useful for so many tasks, of course they want to hide it.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#56

Post by hirvi74 »

I find this entire rant to be utterly ridiculous. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I do not think there is anything wrong with Finder. It's honestly no worse than any other file manager that I have used. I much prefer Finder to any alternative I have tried.

I really enjoy the various keyboard shortcuts [1]. I honestly wish more file managers had some of these features. I probably use "shift+command+g" the most. It's so nice being able to jump through Finder like changing directories in the terminal.

Honestly, for more complex tasks, I actually just use the terminal anyway.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#57

Post by ivankra »

SwellJoe wrote: post #24

My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing so…

You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#58

Post by ch_sm »

unpopular opinion apparently, but i don‘t understand the finder hate. as a real-life, non-software-developer user, i couldn‘t care less about library folders, root folders, or a unix-tradition file system at all. i want my folders with my documents, pictures, etc. to me that‘s far more user-friendly and comprehensible than what explorer exposes to normal people.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#59

Post by ElijahLynn »

Finder is one of the reasons I quit Mac. Main reason was that I had a knack for crashing it. And really not a fan of their marketing department not being completely in sync with their engineering department. Great marketing! But spent like five grand on a desktop Tower Mac and final cut Pro could not use all the cores. This was probably about 10-15 years ago.

Re: Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

#60

Post by hirvi74 »

muppetman wrote: post #28

As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn. Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol

What do you mean by "see the file system?" It's not exactly hard to enable in Finder. In Finder's settings, one can have the root directory, home directory, etc. enabled in the sidebar. Not to mention, one can easily drag & drop common folders into the sidebar too.

Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.

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