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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

#171

Post by rswail »

Wevah wrote: post #111
pan69 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can press Command-Shift-. (period) to toggle hidden files. This isn’t very discoverable, though. You can also hold Option while stopping a folder to get an additional Merge button, but at least one folder needs to have unique items.

Considering there's a Unix underneath, the logical of showing "dotfiles" that are usually hidden is possibly the connection.

But MacOS keyboard shortcuts have always been undiscoverable unless they were part of the menu, which is a problem.

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

#172

Post by chownie »

kqp wrote: post #89

I’d like to propose a rule that all the Finder bashers in this thread accompany their complaint with at least one concrete example. I’m no Apple fanboy, but blind hate is just as bad as blind love, and so far 100% of the specifics brought up have turned out to be people who just don’t have a basic familiarity with the software. I genuinely don’t begrudge a person sticking to what they know, but it’s a point towards w…

The keybindings (and lack of documentation for them) in Finder sucks, having to google how to show hidden files in a save dialogue every time I have to do it sucks, having to search through the UI every time for the non-obvious way to get to a specific path sucks. Do I need to mention .DS_Store?

There are loads of different file managers for many different operating systems, they look and act the way they do from years of refining UX in response to the way users actually interact with them. This is why the file manager on my android phone is so similar to the one on my windows machine, and my linux install. All of them are different to Finder which appeared to lock some UX decisions in circa 1990 and then refuse to budge, this is why Finder sucks.

It's the one OS where file and folder manipulation via the terminal is actually sometimes faster for me, no need to go digging for the specific ritual Finder uses in opposition to every other file manager to do the task.

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

#173

Post by thrwkmmshf00083 »

Suppafly wrote: post #144
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

As a dos/windows/linux users my whole life, I got asked by some family a few years back to get photos off of a mac from a deceased family member. I pulled off everything I could find, but I was never sure I actually found everything because I basically had to just search for different image types, but had no real way to browse to actual folders where things were stored.

It's a Unix system under the fancy UI. Of course there are folders and of course you can go to them. You can also grep in the terminal or whatever you are used to do from Linux to your heart's content.

Personally, I think the representation of the directory tree in Linux and MacOS is equally jarring for a person who has grown up with DOS and Windows. It certainly was for me when I peeked my head out of Bill-Gates-Land as a teenager.

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

#174

Post by thrwkmmshf00083 »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #158

It's funny, as a 20+ year macOS user, I've really struggled with file managers that are not Finder. I don't think it's that Finder is brilliant -- it just encourages a unique set of power user workflows that aren't replicated elsewhere. For example, Open/Save panels that act as drop targets, and navigate to the dropped file's parent folder. I use this all the time , and it drives me nuts when I can't do this on Linux…

You probably know this already but some don't (I certainly didn't for an embarrassingly long time): Rename is F2 in Windows and Linux (well, most distros File manager anyway).

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

#175

Post by thrwkmmshf00083 »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #122

Finder is missing so many basic features that explorer.exe and Linux file managers have had standard for decades. Simple things like easily copying paths (and no, not with a weird keyboard shortcut nobody uses - a simple GUI method, preferably with an address bar, which Finder also lacks), copy queuing (pause queued copies rather than shotgun them all at once), cutting files (FFS why is this feature outright missing?…

The feature is not missing. It is just not enabled by default because Apple hides away complexity (just like modern browsers don't show the link target you are hovering over anymore). Enable the path bar. It does what you want in regards to path copying.

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

#176

Post by maleldil »

scubbo wrote: post #69
hirvi74 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the person you're replying to, but I assume they're referring to the ability to see something like: ``` src ├── app │ └── page.tsx └── components └── header.tsx ``` EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.

You have to indent the text by two or more spaces to count as code. Hacker News doesn't use Markdown, so backticks don't work.

FWIW, this is clear in the "help" link by the textarea.

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

#177

Post by flyingshelf »

maltch wrote: post #27
flyingshelf wrote: post #11

I think you're gonna lose a lot of comments here to the "Finder" word here. The problem is not the Finder but directories, which exist on all operating systems. With that aside, this is a great idea for most files. Of course my images are still in folders with the projects they belong to, but my life photos are in one stream. Files, contacts, a lot of data would benefit greatly from this visualization. As for people…

If you have the time to be focused on folder hierarchy and organization, great. Most of the people I help don't, and I built this for them. In building it, I learned that organizing files wastes much more time than you think. Finding files is all anyone actually needs.

I don't disagree, but it depends. Some files just don't stand alone and are related to each other.

"Stream" photo libraries of people who take pictures for work know this issue all too well: there's a lot of junk mixed with their personal photos. What if we had... folders: one personal and one for work or per customer.

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

#180

Post by antfarm »

It works fine for me, I use the column view (unless I want to sort) and don't use groups (uncheck Edit > Use Groups). Back in the MacOS 7.5 days I had a system extension that gave me the column view I knew from my university's NeXT workstations. For more complex file operations, there is Terminal.
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