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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

#101
If we are complaining about the impossibility of finding the files you touched in the past few days, what are your impressions of using Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in conjunction with SharePoint and OneDrive? Oh… and don’t forget shared files in Teams channels.

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

#102
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode. I can make the apologetics for just about anything in macOS. After over 20 years of using OS X/macOS, I still can't make the case for this one. Imagine a button has focus, you hit Enter, and it allows you to change the text on the button instead of executing the code behind button.click() . That behavior is just as dumb if a file has focus in Finder.

Because, as one of the original GUIs, when they conceived of how the Macintosh worked, you used the command keys to perform actions on files, and you could rename the file just by typing. Cmd-O was the shortcut for opening files, which makes sense for obvious reasons. When they released the Macintosh to the world, Andy Hertzfeld realized that people were renaming items in the Finder by accident; so he added the "retu…

because the original Macintosh didn't have arrow keys on the keyboard.

However, the very next keyboard they designed did have them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Plus_Exte...

I can't imagine editing text on a keyboard with no arrow keys to be any better than the horrible experience of doing it on a mobile device... which might be why Apple decided to add them quite early in the history of the Mac.

It's also ironic that despite justifying the menubar at the top of the screen as being easier to hit, they then totally missed the awkwardness of not being able to navigate with only one hand by using the arrow keys and the nearby return/enter. Watching someone experienced using Windows' file manager with only the keyboard is almost vi-like in its efficiency.

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

#103

Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get

Finder sucks, information storing and retrieval should be frictionless

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you!!

This suggests that you were genuine in not knowing. But had you never done a quick web search? It's the kind of thing that I'd feel compelled to find whether I could change the behavior to fit what I would prefer. Anyway, if you're unaware, here are a couple useful shortcuts for kbd-driven navigation: Command-Down (arrow) to dig one level down the file tree and Command-Up (arrow) to move to the enclosing directory /…

I also didn't know how to do that, and I'm certain that I've looked it up at some point. It's just so unintuitive that I'd need to do it daily to remember

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or you click on "Go" in the menu bar. What key combo did you want that would be less 'magical'?

A path bar anywhere in the interface? I also want this to be able to copy a file’s path. Right now I’m not even sure how to do that aside from cmd-i to get info and then clunkily drag select the parent dir to copy. Repeat for the file name. Am I insane or is there a better way? Just use terminal? For a time I used pathfinder which had a feature to copy the full path but I ended up hating the subscription and constant…

It's not unusual for Mac users to create custom shortcuts for things like this using built-in and 3rd-party tools like Shortcuts, Automator/AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Hammerspoon, etc.

For copying the path of a file specifically, in Finder you can hold Option and then pick EditCopy as Pathname.

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

#106
post #91

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

When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe how terrible Finder is. This is software from the "design" company. One of the biggest pitfalls I ran into at the time (and remember from the top of my head) was that when you copy a folder, and a folder with the same name already exists at the destination, it will quietly replace it, rather than giving me a dialog asking if I want to Replace or Merg…

They certainly design --- to look good at first glance, but not necessarily be practical.

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

#107

Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get

Finder sucks, information storing and retrieval should be frictionless

Pronouncing your name is like a drunk French guy saying "I'm outta beer"

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

#108
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explorer is a much better tool than Finder. Couldn't agree more.

And yet copying multiple large files from or to the same disk grinds the throughput to a halt on Windows where Finder keeps up close to theoretical bandwidth in sum.

That's not a UI issue.

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or you click on "Go" in the menu bar. What key combo did you want that would be less 'magical'?

A path bar anywhere in the interface? I also want this to be able to copy a file’s path. Right now I’m not even sure how to do that aside from cmd-i to get info and then clunkily drag select the parent dir to copy. Repeat for the file name. Am I insane or is there a better way? Just use terminal? For a time I used pathfinder which had a feature to copy the full path but I ended up hating the subscription and constant…

Context menu → hold Option; “Copy” will change to “Copy as Path”. (Sometimes you can just drag and drop the file to where you want to paste, but that depends on the destination app and so isn’t consistent.)

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

#110
post #91

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

When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe how terrible Finder is. This is software from the "design" company. One of the biggest pitfalls I ran into at the time (and remember from the top of my head) was that when you copy a folder, and a folder with the same name already exists at the destination, it will quietly replace it, rather than giving me a dialog asking if I want to Replace or Merg…

⇧˖⌘˖. (Shift-Command-Period) will show/hide hidden files in Finder
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