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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how deeply embedded the old Finder is in my subconscious. I opened the app and instantly noticed several differences from the original, even though I haven't run the old System 7 Finder in, what, twenty years?

Things I noticed:

- Command-W doesn't close a window.

- No animation when opening windows.

- Dragging outside of the close button while still holding the mouse button (uh, trackpad button) down should revert it to the non-pushed state until the cursor re-enters it.

- Obviously, the fonts shouldn't be anti-aliased. The metrics on Chicago look weird too.

I am so filled with nostalgia right now I don't know what to do with myself. I loved the System 7 Finder. It's one of the things that got me into UI design and pixel art.

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I really miss the System 7 Finder, the 'spatial' nature[1] really clicked with me and other file browsers still sort of bug me because of that.

[1] http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm

Nautilus (GNOME Files) used to have a spatial mode, I was rather perturbed when they didn't bring it forward for GNOME 3. Obviously Apple killed the spatial finder with OS X, though it's always had the quasi-spatial mode with the pill button (remember that? I'm a little miffed about that one too, especially now that they've gotten rid of the dedicated full screen button that gave it the boot to make me hold Option every time I want to zoom a window instead of full screening it).

You can still enable the spatial mode by hiding the toolbar via the "View" menu

Or command-option-T.

Unfortunately the browser view has a habit of coming back - when you connect to a new network drive, or insert a USB stick, or just randomly. If there were a defaults bool I could set to turn it off forever, that'd be wonderful.

But unfortunately you then lose the actually-somewhat-useful sidebar.

It makes sense to me that the sidebar is incompatible with spatial browsing. It changes the size/shape of the window, and the items there are a list of aliases that don't exist in that space.

You make a good point, and I don't disagree. But it does come in handy occasionally.

Fun fact: Nautilus was written by a company founded by Andy Hertzfeld and many of the initial employees were also alums from Apple's original Macintosh team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel

Lovely little project. I saw a few little discrepancies too - I guess that's fine, but when I read "functional recreation" on the project site, my mind registered "fully functional recreation".

It's been a while since I used a classic Mac, having defected to Windows in the 90s and not returning until the 2010s, but I'm pretty sure (?) I could:

* drag the bottom right corner to resize the window * drag the scrollbar thumb to scroll * drag a rectangle inside a finder window to select multiple items (see below) * click the top right corner to "maximise" (kind of) the window

Regarding dragging rectangles, I remember my awe as a kid when I first saw a GUI system (a Lisa being demoed at an Apple expo in the early 80s) and I rushed home to write a "drag a rectangle" program on the Apple 2 (a ][ or a //e - my Dad was a dealer for a while) with game paddles :) Hence why I think you could do that in the old Mac finder.

FWIW HN does not support markdown (or any markup other than emphasis really), so "lists" are really a bunch of paragraphs with a starting marker, and thus you have to leave a blank line between list items.

Yep. Weirdly, felt the same. I immediately tried to resize the window from bottom corner, use arrow keys to select, and then command arrow-down to open the file, and command-I to get-info. They didn't work, but that's okay. It's weird, the window was close enough in my memory to invoke those old navigation mechanisms and expect them to work even though I haven't used a classic MacOS in a very long time.

Command-W works out-of-the-box in Cocoa, but it looks like the author has unfortunately customized the menu bar and disabled this feature.

The author notes that they mostly re-created it from screenshots and having an OS9 box running, so I expect they just missed the more subtle behaviours.

Now I was going to say you should report these issues on the project[0]'s bug tracker, but it looks like the author has disabled the bug tracker.

[0] https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/overview

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