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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan of the Midnight Commander-style of UI, but I'll give it a try since anything has got to be better than the mess that is the Finder these days .. I still don't understand why Apple can't push Finder to be a more modern interface for the system without completely screwing it up .. so much to improve, but yet they are ignoring it in favour of sandboxes and "nobody knows what a filesystem is" policies that make us all dumber.

One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints. (I have to do it manually.) This is very frustrating, and I'd love to know of a solution ..

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Can't agree with you more! The other issue I have with macOS is the maximize button which defaults to "fullscreen". I have become used to pressing the Option/Alt button before clicking the green maximize button. It's so obvious that it is a very bad design decision. Even more surprising is that this "feature" has been kept around for 3 versions of macOS. Am I the only one who finds this UX so counter-intuitive? Else why would it stick around for 3 versions of macOS?

After so many years, I've learned to not click on the maximize button at all. Just double click the title bar and it will fill the screen.

I personally have a utility installed that adds a Windows-esque "snap" functions, including maximization. That green button's behavior is a usability nightmare.

RightZoom (free): http://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html

Though I also tend to have ShiftIt or SizeUp installed and always use the keyboard shortcut instead.

Definitely - I use Moom for this purpose and can recommend it, https://manytricks.com/moom/

I think alt clicking on the maximise button "maximises"

Full ack! To fix those issues and many more I started to use Spectacle [1] some months ago which steady improved my workflows. I could not even think about working with macOS without it.

[1] https://www.spectacleapp.com

Thanks for the link! I'll take a look at it!

Spectacle is an essential app for me. I feel completely lost whenever I use a mac that doesn't have it installed.

Give Divvy a try (http://mizage.com/divvy/).

I find it to be quite configurable, easy to use and quite better than the available alternatives.

>Not a fan of the Midnight Commander-style of UI, but I'll give it a try since anything has got to be better than the mess that is the Finder these days

What exactly got worse in the Finder "these days"? I don't see anything that changed for the worse since OS X 10.2 If anything, current Finder is much improved in most aspects.

>One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints.

Not sure what you mean, since the list view seems to work just fine.

Open a Finder window with some files in it. Hit list view (Cmd-2) ... notice that the text labels do not expand to fit/fill the text contents they contain - you have to do this manually by stretching the window, aligning the list columns manually, etc.

This really should be laying itself out automatically - like if you hit Ctrl-Alt-Numpad+ on an Explorer window on a Windows machine, which has had the ability to present the view in a useful, readable auto-layout .. since 1995.

>Open a Finder window with some files in it. Hit list view (Cmd-2) ... notice that the text labels do not expand to fit/fill the text contents they contain

Why should they? I don't want the column sizes to change under me, I want them to stay as they were left. Some text labels (filename, other meta etc) could be too large to display anyway.

That said, you can double click the right divider on any column to have it expand to fit the largest of its contents.

And if you option double-click the divider, all of the columns will be the right size.

thanks!

Thanks for that .. I believe I may finally be able to fix this decades-long annoyance with this tidbit of handy information.

>Why should they? I don't want the column sizes to change under me, I want them to stay as they were left.

Well, I want the window to expand to show me the content of the folder and the file metadata without me having to do anything special - no hotkeys, no special zones to remember.

This would make it actually useful, as a utility, rather than something I have to service, as a user, on a frequent basis in order to get the details I want.

It just seems so obviously broken and such an obvious feature that I can't think why it isn't being done .. nearly every other file-system explorer interface I use, on Linux and occasionally Windows, can show this information properly through auto layout without human intervention .. yet Finder is some kind of special.

When you sort by date it automatically groups them by today, yesterday, last week, etc. which is fine, but then within those grouping they are not sorted by date/time

What you call "sort by date" is not sort by date, it's called "arrangement" and is a grouping (hence the various groups shown).

The reason why the items are not sorted by date inside the groups, is because you have some other column selected as the sort column (e.g. the name, size, or whatever is the default).

You can click the "Date Modified", "Date created" or any date column you want, and then the items will be both grouped by date (into the groups you see, today, yesterday, last week, etc) AND sorted by date within the groups.

The finder could force it so that it always sorts by the item you selected to group by with, but this is more flexible.

Oh. Ok. Thanks!

Certainly doesn't solve your problem to know this, though, does it? I for one cannot fathom how this sorting arrangement is of use to anyone, personally ..

>Certainly doesn't solve your problem to know this, though, does it?

Of course it does, since now they can click on the date column inside a group, and get the order they want for that group, in addition to the overall grouping into buckets based on date ranges.

>* I for one cannot fathom how this sorting arrangement is of use to anyone, personally ..*

Well, if I just wanted "show everything sorted by date" I could have done it in list view.

Grouped (arrangement) view shows the data in groups. What one might want the grouping to be and what the order to be inside the groups is not necessarily (if ever) the same.

E.g. if I want to look at files of a certain naming scheme that I created last week, I could set to arrange the finder items by date (so I get I nice "past week" group, today group, month group etc) and see the items inside sorted by name.

If I want the items in the groups sorted by date too -- I can just as easily.

If Finder could only use the same column to form groups that it uses to sort inside the group I couldn't do that.

This is the most flexible way -- and analogous to what all and any database systems offer, where group by column is not necessarily the same as the order by column.

My grievances include that it's only sometimes possible to enter in a custom path (e.g., /Users/foo/bar/baz) and that the home directory rarely shows up in the left side bar, making it frustrating to get at non-blessed files and directories in my home folder. Also, the default right-marching-list-view is nigh impossible to use.

Doesn't CMD+SHIFT+G work globally ?

No idea. I've never used CMD+SHIFT+G. Why should I need a keyboard shortcut to bring up a text box that every other decent file browser includes by default?

Yes

You can set a Light theme instead under Preferences

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