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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.

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I think you are in the minority here. For most people, navigating from one folder to another is not "functionality I don't want" in a desktop folder browser, but is the main thing you want to do. I'd much rather have UI that lets me navigate efficiently than that makes it efficient to copy-and-paste arbitrary substrings within a folder path. I do the former almost every time I use the file browser and the latter basically never.

My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

>My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

It's not completely the same as on Windows, but:

- Shift-Apple-G lets you enter a directory path to open (including bash-like completion with tab).

- Option-Apple-P shows/hides the "path bar" at the lower edge of a window where the hierarchy of the current folder is displayed (including a spartan context menu).

On Windows I mainly use the explorer address bar to go to those hidden folders like ProgramData.

On OS X, I think you can just right-click the window name and select the parent folder you want to go up to.

I think there is also a "show breadcrumbs" option in the preferences for Finder, which may or may not give more of the functionality you want.

Thanks for the right-click on title tip... doesn't seem to have a show breadcrumbs option that I can find... still in yosimite on my work laptop though.

The menu option actually calls it "Path Bar", not "Breadcrumb Bar".

> How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

Well, the tree view in dolphin is small, and mostly hidden by the bookmark menu.

So I have to resort to using the breadcrumbs as a poor (wo-)mans tree view.

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