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Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

The one thing I don't understand that Mac has never adopted is being able to use open and save dialogues as mini file explorers (move stuff around and rename, specifically). Having to switch to Finder to move or rename a file that has the same name as the file I'm trying to save is ridiculous. Of course I never need to do this anymore since I only work on text files under revision control, but it still seems odd to me it was never introduced. I really just miss Window Explorer A LOT since moving to Mac. I don't hate macOS, but Finder is a bit of a joke.

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To be fair, Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this.

(On the flip side, Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage is such an utter piece of garbage that I can't imagine there being any overlap of designers between the two dialogues.)

@blattimwind: "Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux"

I hadn't realized that KDE was copied from Windows 95. I'm surprised no one here has mentioned NeXTSTEP. Here's a demo by Steve Jobs from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

Looking at this NeXTSTEP seems ridiculously ahead of its time.

It’s awesome that his goal has always been to allow “mere mortals” to be able to use computers. I can’t believe it’s from 1992. Why is it still so hard to build a database powered app in 2018?

I forgot how good Steve Jobs was at demoing.

Had he grown up anywhere else, with any other friends, he would have been one hell of a car salesman...

Windows (Word) workflow:

- Click the FILE tab

- Wait two full seconds while it replaces my screen with something else

- Click Save As

- Click Computer (because Microsoft wants you to do everything in the cloud)

- Click Browse

- Finally proceed to saving your document like you would be able to do immediately on any other system

To remedy this: File > Options > Save >Save to Computer by Default (yes, agreed that this is ridiculous).

A habit that I've developed from earliest computer classes in elementary school is to save the file in the location you want as soon as it's named, so ever after Ctrl+S saves it with no hassle.

Word 2016 also has "Don't show backstage while opening or saving files" in the same options dialog, which basically hides the Backstage UI[1] unless you specifically invoke it from the File menu, and shows a plain old Open/Save dialog instead.

I agree it's very ridiculous.

[1] 'Backstage UI' is the bit that looks like this: https://kiatplayground.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/save-to-o...

Press F12 for Save As in Word and Excel.

Reasons like this I still use office 2010 and will probably cling to it as long as I possibly can.

Absolutely true. I use a MATE desktop too, I can't even rename files in the save dialog. And I don't want to look it up either because it is so inconsistent all the time...

I would extend your argument to Windows Explorer in general.

Gnome's save dialog allows you to rename or delete files. Maybe MATE should take some inspiration from the newer version of their desktop environment...

I don't really care whos fault it is, or which DE allows this. Such basic stuff MUST work.

Sometimes I feel like the developers don't want stuff to work similar to Windows. Because that would be admitting that Microsoft actually did something right.

> Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage

It's not the same vintage. It's a carry over from Win 3.0.

It is not.

Windows 3.0 didn't have any standard system dialogs, these were introduced in 3.1, but that is not the main point. In Windows 3.1 the directory selection dialog was exactly the same as file open/save dialog (Figure 8 in the article) but didn't let you to choose files (and there are still places in windows where standard open dialog is used for choosing directory).

What is typically used as "standard directory selection dialog" actually isn't even documented standard WinAPI dialog, but originally internal dialog of the explorer shell (and it would not surprise me it it was not present in original Windows 95 RTM but introduced in some slightly later version), also it does not select directories (ie. pathname as string), but shell folders (ie. ITEMIDLIST).

Because that is extremely non-intuitive. It's an "Open" and "Save" dialog. That is what it should do. Joe Public is not going to know it does anything else, yet it does.

Actually, you completely missed my point. The Windows dialogue is not only superior, because it allows power users to do what they need, but also because it's actually usable for regular users.

For example: I literally can't know how I can save a file using Gnome's dialogue in the general case, e.g. if the dialogue opens at /foo, and I navigate to /foo/bar using the dialogue, but then go back to /foo ("bar wasn't the right place after all"), I can't save the file there any more. "bar" will be selected. Clicking "Save" while a directory is selected will not save, but navigate instead. Now I'm in "bar" again. I go back to /foo and try to click something else, say a file. This changes the to-be-saved-file's name to the selection.

After I asked someone who uses Gnome as their main desktop they told me "that's easy: you just have to ctrl+click on the selected directory to de-select it, then you can save in the current directory".

That, my dear readers, is indeed unusable garbage.

As a long-time Gnome user, I've only realized how bad it is after reading this comment ;) (No irony here, I agree it's truly horrible now.)

But, I only realized it now because almost none of the apps I regularly use make use of Gnome's default file open/save dialog. Linux's extreme inconsistency has some benefits ;)

Oh, and talking about Gnome, the only reason anyone uses it is that after configuring a few basic stuff, you can completely ignore it, just run your apps, forget that there's an actual OS with GUI somewhere beneath them. Heck, if even the applications running on it ignore Gnome and its "standard widgets", its biggest strength is that it can be easily ignored!

And watch them take that as cudos...

your irony stack is too deep for hn, it might overflow soon

> Clicking "Save" while a directory is selected will not save, but navigate instead.

That's one of the most absurd and glaring usability bugs I've ever heard.

> I go back to /foo and try to click something else, say a file. This changes the to-be-saved-file's name to the selection.

That is the most annoying part to me. Windows does this as well. It's such a rare thing to want to overwrite a file for me, I find it so irritating that if I accidentally click on a file name instead of a folder, suddenly I lose the file name that I wanted to save as. Usually I just cancel and start again. So stupid.

Whereas I would find it irritating if it didn't have that behaviour. Sure it's not the most common operation, but it's still quite common to want to overwrite an existing file.

This is the excuse that's always used, but I rarely see it play out in practice. Many people don't notice advanced features that are present, that's true. But they don't notice them so it does matter. For the people who do, they can easily discover advanced features through exploring the interface.

Apple have a tradition of being really bad at this. Many of the (slightly more) advanced features are completely hidden behind undiscoverable key combinations or very hidden features. The slide-to-reveal pattern on iOS (now mostly fixed with augmentations) is a good example. Middle clicking the titlebar in Finder to reveal the directory parents is another.

In Windows's save dialog, right-clicking on a file gives me the same list it does in Explorer. In Mac's save dialog, right-clicking on a file does nothing.

It's not like the Mac way saves screen real estate or anything. It's like the way Firefox lets me close a tab by middle-clicking on it. Most users don't know it's possible, but it doesn't actively harm them to have the feature there.

I have similar problems with the Finder. Right-click a file on the Desktop and you have the option to compress a file. Open the Finder to the desktop folder, that option isn't present -- it's grayed out on the Finder file menu as well.

I really like the fact that the Windows save dialog is basically Windows Explorer, and I really miss those features when an application uses the older file save API (which gives a more Windows 95 / 3.11 interface).

"Joe Public" is a strawman people who make crap software prop up as the reason their software has to be crap.

It beats using "your mother" or "your grandmother" as the term for a stupid person.

I am going to print this and put it on my wall.

OSX Finder is horrible. Classic MacOS Finder was far better - but still had open/save dialogs.

RiscOS had it right - the Open dialog didn't exist - you would open the folder and double-click the file. And the Save dialog didn't exist - the document would reduce to an icon which you would then place into the correct folder. (You can sort of do this on the various versions of macOS by dragging the icon from the title bar but it's inconsistent)

You could always replace your usage of the modern macOS Finder with my poor and very incomplete clone of the classic Mac Finder. :)

https://classicmacfinder.com

A few years ago, I actually searched around for an implementation of the classic finder, so this is very amusing for me to see actually implemented!

What I was interested in back then was the idea that there was a direct correspondence between the folder window and the data structure on the hard disk, and that to the user these concepts should be indistinguishable. One part of the illusion is that a folder always appears in the same place with the same window size, to give the sense that the folder is a tangible thing with permanence.

Glad you're enjoying it!

It's got a loooonnggg way to go (I never realized how many small but vital details are in a file explorer application), but it's strangely exciting to see it draw itself on modern macOS, especially on a retina screen!

And yes, the spatial UX! I'm still working through getting all of that implemented (I just completed persisting window locations/positioning days ago). I have recently been reading theough some of John Siracusa's turn of the Mac OS X era writings and that's been hugely insightful and helpful. The level of detail (both of the original Finder and his writings) is impressive and sirprising.

Very cool UX concepts!

I also used to love the fact that the equivalent of kernel extensions (totally forgotten the name) could be disabled by moving them to a different folder. The file system IS the computer.

Agreed! I think that this behavior may have been one of the truly novel principles of classic Mac OS.

IIRC, you even used to be able to just swap the System folder around and have like a completely new/different install of Mac OS.

Amazing

What do you find horrible? I prefer it by a wide margin over Windows Explorer.

I prefer it over Windows Explorer. I prefer the Classic Mac Finder to both.

This article from 2003 lists the problems with the OSX Finder. Since it was written, it's only got worse.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

Coming from the other direction, it kills me when I'm using windows and have a save dialog open, then drag the file I want to open into it from the explorer. On windows it moves the file to a possibly new location, while on OSX the save dialog selects the file you dropped on it (without moving it).

I have the opposite experience WRT Finder vs Explorer. I use a Mac as my primary machine, but have a PC for games. Trying to use a file browser without Miller columns[0] drives me crazy.

I love being able to drag a file up one level in the tree without cutting and navigating to the destination to paste, or having 2 windows open to almost the exact same location.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

> I love being able to drag a file up one level in the tree without cutting and navigating to the destination to paste, or having 2 windows open to almost the exact same location.

While Miller columns certainly support that, so does the tree view in the left panel in the default Windows explorer layout.

Honestly I didn't think of tree view before seeing this (and neither did the friends I asked who are more regular Windows users than I am). I'm gonna give it a shot.

I've been using bitCommander, which is a Windows file manager that supports (among other things) Miller columns.

Compared to the tree view, Miller columns use more horizontal space, but have less vertical overflow. Which is superior probably depends a lot on your usage patterns, but both will support “drag to (grand, etc.) parent of current folder” fairly simply.

Another good approach might be to do it the other way around: Get rid of the pseudo-file-manager dialogs entirely and let applications integrate with the regular file manager.

I think RISC OS (?) did this. Open documents in applications had icons representing them which you could drag to the file manager to save. (And perhaps to other applications to open?) Mac OS also has (or had?) this to some extent – many document-based applications show an icon in the title bar, which is for dragging and dropping the document in question.

Even Windows has an example of catering to this way of working, in Explorer, where the folder icon in the location bar represents the current folder and can be dragged and dropped. They even have some custom behavior to prevent the window from being raised when you drag from it, so that it works more like classic Mac OS and lets you drag to an overlapping window.

Windows Explorer can be extended; the example I remember is browsing a folder of email message files, both the metadata attributes displayed in list view, and a functional content pane for viewing the message itself.

Be OS did this, too; I got the impression that Windows was inspired by that, both for BeFS (NTFS) and the desktop filesystem UX.

NTFS was introduced a few years before BEOS.

More likely that they were both inspired by a common source.

Never mind that MS have been working on a fully database driven FS (WinFS?) for ages.

You can use most open/save dialogues to do this - a right-click is all it takes in most places. But I definitely agree with your sentiment. Finder feels like a badly-designed toy. The latest things they've added - tabs and labels iirc - require more steps to do the same tasks in the new way versus the old way.

While a fair point, it’s important that feature-rich OS components be designed correctly (including security) and this wasn’t the case with Windows.

How many exploits were just a matter of tricking an extra-fancy OS dialog into popping open something it’s not supposed to, escalating permissions alongside it?

On OS X, open/save panels run in a different process via ViewBridge, at least they did last time I checked.

I would normally agree with you here except that I've accidentally renamed files on Windows so many times only to lose them because something was in focus that I didn't intend to be. I use a combination of the mouse and keyboard when browsing and the fact that I can accidentally click on a file (which renames my current file to that file) and save or click enter thinking that I'm saving which then just starts to rename the file is utter garbage in an Open or Save dialog box. I feel like the only things I should be able to do are Open a file or Save a file but not rename other files. Neither is a good solution so it comes down to preference but I definitely see the reason for it because it happens to me on Windows all the time.

From someone traveling in the opposite direction at the moment: the Windows folder selection dialog is the crustiest open/save relic of them all and "open files are locked even to administrators" is a UX catastrophe. Lesser pains: it hurts to have missing consistent "jump to enclosing folder" semantics everywhere (command-click on mac -- only get an equivalent context menu 30% of the time) and to not have the ability to snap open/save dialogs to a particular file or folder with drag and drop.

The door swings in both directions, in other words :)

> "open files are locked even to administrators" is a UX catastrophe.

This can't be blamed on UX people. It's an ancient difference between Unix and VMS and not easy to fix.

Windows Explorer, on the other hand, still has no “expand folder” functionality on the right pane. I have to go back and forth to sort garbage trees, opening multiple windows or temporary pinning all folders into favorites. Given that their names may intersect, problem gets worse. In Finder you just expand interesting folders and DnD until it’s done.

What really is a joke is a left pane that combines favorites, libraries (die, die, DIE) and disk trees. It was never usable, except for favorites.

I believe this has been possible for some time on macOS.

Haha, damn ok, it's been so long since I've had to do this, I didn't realize it is now possible (I used to want this all the time and was the bane of my existence in the late 90s early 2000s when using Mac). You still can't seem to move files into sibling directories, though, only to directory links in the sidebar. Anyway, I LEARNED SOMETHING TODAY (about macOS dialogues and about testing things before I open my mouth).

++edited to clarify language.++

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