Out of pure curiosity, what about finder is a mess to people these days? I feel like I can move around it smoothly and I use it many times daily. Adding some services like opening a file/folder in terminal has also helped me a lot.
- Files not displaying until you navigate away from a directory and return again.
- The visibly selected file not being the actual selected file. This is most obvious if you hit spacebar to preview contents and it previews the wrong file contents (typically one file above in the list). However, it can occasionally happen with copy and paste, meaning you paste the wrong file!
- Crashes. I don't actually use Finder all that often, typically command line. Nonetheless, I do still experience the occasional Finder crash.
However, in addition to bugs, there is one design issue that I dislike:
- "Recents" being the default when you open a new window. Finder tends to come to a grinding halt unless you swap location quickly as macOS does who-knows-what trying to determine your "recents".
Cheers :)
> Anecdotally, i’ve never experienced any of the other issues in 15 years of using macOS.
I've only got just over 10 years up my sleeve, but I suspect most of the issues I run into are because I don't exclusively use Finder. File system changes originating from other processes (typically terminal) seem to be what trips Finder up.
That's strange. I have never seen this and I've been using OS X since day one, every day. In fact I remember being thrilled when the Spotlight hooks where added and I could run “touch test” on Terminal and the file would instantly appear in the Finder.
> - "Recents"
Oh yes, one of the first things I change, Finder -> Preferences -> General -> New Finder Windows Show…
> That's strange. I have never seen this and I've been using OS X since day one, every day.
It happens to me quite often when working with network shares. Never happened on local disks, though.
Also it works everywhere there are document proxy icons in the title bar.
Final cool tip, you can drag and drop the tiny file/folder icon in the titlebar, it’s a proxy for the file/folder itself.
Oh and that icon goes grey when the file isn’t saved and that’s also when the close button gets a dot...
As long as we’re talking macOS tricks: you can enable tabbing through the UI with Command-F7 and space activates the outlined button, while enter always activates the “solid” button.
The fact that it sometimes just simply stops updating the directory contents of a remote fileshare is enough to make me distrust it.
It's so poorly implemented and buggy that sometimes I just open a terminal window to move files around.
You need to know all the commands on how to open a path, navigate one directory up, etc.
If I need to switch to Finder after navigating somewhere for some reason, `open .` is handy.
I used Ubuntu for years and much prefer the Nautilus (not sure if they still use that) file manager.
Personally, this has grown on me. It makes sense that Enter edits the filename, because the filename is a form field, and the Enter key seems to be assigned universally by the OSX HIG to switch the keyboard's arrow keys et al between having movement between form fields, and movement of the text caret inside a form field.
Basically, consider your desktop to be an Excel spreadsheet. Would it make sense for Enter to not do what it does?
It also, separately, makes sense that CMD+Down enters a folder (or, y'know, opens files/starts applications), because it's the complementary operation to CMD+Up. You go "up out of" a folder; you go "down into" a folder (or document, or application.) Nicely, unlike with Enter (which is overloaded with text-editing uses), this allows there to be a universal HIG-approved accelerator for an application's "descend" or "invoke" (or hopefully both) action.
(But if that isn't a sensible justification, some people just take the stance that Enter being "edit this field"—being a system-wide universal—has priority over whatever the Finder might want to use it for, so the Finder just has to get its own accelerator. Thus, CMD+Down.)
See also: CMD+[ and CMD+] as universal Back/Forward shortcuts. If they were anything else (say, if Back was mapped to Backspace), they couldn't be universal. But nothing was already using CMD+[ and CMD+], so they're free to be a universal convention. (Seriously, they work in iTunes! And in System Preferences!)
> not being able to cut (only copy) files
People think this functionality isn't there in the Finder, but it is! It just... has slightly different semantics than in all other apps... for some reason.
From https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201236:
> Option-Command-V — Move: Move the files in the Clipboard from their original location to the current location.
IOW, you don't decide whether something is a "cut" or a "copy" when starting the async-buffered-drag-and-drop-operation; you decide whether something was a "cut" or a "copy" when performing the drop part of the async-drag-and-drop-operation. (Which is similar to the synchronous drag-and-drop operations you perform with the mouse: to turn a "move" into a "copy" of a dragged file, you hold the Command key as you let go of the mouse button. You're modifying the drop event, not the drag event.)
Alt/Option also toggles the “quit” on dock context menu to “force quit” without waiting for the app to go unresponsive or invoking the command-ESC force quit dialog.
I've used macOS for about 2 years now, and I never found a method to do this that is intuitive. Windows Find has a large directory bar at the top where a user can go to any directory by just typing it.
Here's a list of other useful shortcuts for Finder and other contexts.
This also works in application file dialogs.
Personally, I've always preferred the Mac OS <= 9 Finder. I don't care for applications that have a web-browser-esque back-arrow to get to some presumed previous context. I'd much rather have multiple windows viewing the same content. (In Xcode, for instance, I loathe the default "one window to rule them all" behavior and I end up using CMD-shift-O and typing there name of the file I want to open - even if it was one that I know is already opened recently. Back arrow takes me to "some content" - but I have to look carefully to know what that content was. But if I'm able to place two windows side by side, I can easily cmd-twiddle between them and know which is which based on its location on my screen.)
All that being said, I do everything from Terminal anyway. (where you can type 'open ~/Documents/' to jump to that location in the Finder.)
Shift-Cmd-A: Applications
Shift-Cmd-H: Home
Shift-Cmd-U: Utilities
Shift-Cmd-C: ComputerI can't explain well enough why the treeview is better, you'll have to use it. 1) less mouse travel for switching, 2) you can expand multiple branches simultaneously and switch back and forth easily.
I have no solution to (1). It's not something that worries me.
The solution to (2) is for it to be conceptually light and easy to have multiple windows open. I use "new window on button 1" and single click to open. This more-or-less does the trick.
However the thing which really converted me was the shear ease of using ROX-Filer by keyboard; it gives you access to a nice command-line style interface insofar as you can navigate to the folder you want easily and you can pick the operation first, then the files (i.e. on the commandline you say "rm thisfile", but most guis require you to say "thisfile delete it". ROX-Filer lets you say press DEL and then select the file.) It also has super awesome navigation. And I think most of all, you can switch modes (i.e. between navigating and interacting with files) with the keyboard - ESC or / depending on direction. Most other file managers require you to use the mouse or the TAB to switch modes, and if it's TAB you can't predict how many times you need to press it.
I'm not sure I understand. Doesn't Finder have a tree view?
"[N]eed a tree view where you expand/collapse and the 2nd view updates automatically to show the items in the selected folder. So basic, but not available in standard Finder! (and no, the column view does not what I want - not even close!) Currently I use List view, but once you've expanded a few folders, the view gets unwieldily long."
[0] nothing beats folders and files for organising stuff! https://cocoatech.uservoice.com/users/726110224-nothing-beat...
[1] Add a tree view like in Windows Explorer https://cocoatech.uservoice.com/forums/275-path-finder-ideas...
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/161867/file-browse...