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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

I miss it as well. Mac OS 7 was awesome in it's simplicity. I also thought maintaining the machine was pretty simple in case there was some driver issue. Just do a kind-of safe boot (by pressing shift on start-up IIRC) which would disable all extensions and control panels. And then one could try to disable all or some extensions during the next start-up and see if that would solve the issue. All in all it worked rather well and that was pretty much all there was to managing the system.

Though nowadays I would miss having a decent terminal. Perhaps A/UX [0] was decent, but I never tried that.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

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Yes, and I really miss the classic Mac OS finder with its spatial metaphor. Icons stayed where you left them, every window remembered its position, shape, size, view settings, etc. You could recognize, at a glance, what folder a window belonged to based on these strong visual cues, without needing to read any of the text on the screen.

For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before, it's kind of difficult to describe how good it was. There is this incredible feeling of solidity, reliability, etc. Things don't move around behind your back; everything is right where you left it. I miss it so much!

Maybe they'll bring it back one in VR/AR.

Maybe!

One thing Adi Robertson at The Verge said about Magic Leap is that she put things down... and then forgot where she put them! The limited FOV means you have to be basically looking right at something to see it.

> For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before

Its been a while since I've used Nautilus, but back in GNOME 2 it had spatial design.

John Siracusa has been talking about the “spatial Finder” for over 15 years....

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

Surely, such file browser can't be that hard to develop as a user space application, right? I mean there are explorer alternatives on windows, a plethora of GUI file browsers on linux, and I have no idea but I can only assume there's at least one finder alternative on mac. I wonder why this hasn't been done yet.

If no one has done it, it can’t be that easy.

Let's go further: If no one has done it, it must be impossible.

For a while nautilus had this, I believe it was referred to as "spacial mode". It wasn't popular and eventually it was dropped. Which was a shame because as a former Mac user I was really excited by the idea. I think though that I have a much different relationship with my files and folders across a dozen computers these days than I did back when I only had one Mac desktop... if nothing else there are a lot more of them and in a way I guess I feel less "ownership" of my storage. And so I am less interested in keeping things nearly organized. And modern operating systems have much better search features which means that careful file organization is less important too.

> I guess I feel less "ownership" of my storage.

Why wouldn't you when developers have the opinion that their way is the right way to do things and you're retarded if you don't let their software organize your life for you? No comrade, you can't install software directly from the vendor! You must use almighty package-manager and hope The People have deigned that software worthy of inclusion in the repo. If you're lucky it might only be a few versions out of date! You don't actually want icons on your desktop, just use the application menu we built for you. Our AI assistant will choose an appropriate time to automatically install OS updates and reboot your machine, citizen. If it does so in the middle of your work or when you really need to use it, that's your fault for not training it well enough!

The spatial Finder is still alive and well in modern macOS!

All you have to do is hide the toolbar, and it pops back into spatial Finder mode.

Give it a try!

No, that mode is a weak compromise.

The reason the old Mac Finder worked was its ruthless consistency. The new macOS finder occasionally opens windows with a toolbar or with the wrong view or in the wrong location or the wrong size. As soon as that happens the illusion is broken.

Seems inefficient though, these days I really only navigate with Spotlight. Just hit the key command, type what I’m looking for, and hit enter. I don’t like navigating through any finder-like UI to access my files.

> I really miss the classic Mac OS finder with its spatial metaphor.

Everyone keeps saying that, but current macOS still seems to remember icon positions. Isn't that what the .DS_Store files are mostly for?

The current Finder has both a spacial mode and a browser mode. Unfortunately, the two modes step on each other's toes, making both modes worse. It's been a problem since OS X 10.0, and it persists today.

E.g.:

Navigating around in browser mode clobbers the existing folder view state (window size and position, view mode, etc.). So your folders always seem to lose their view state.

And there's no way to set a preferred browser window size. Instead, it always uses the spacial mode window size and if there is none it uses the hard coded default window size, which is way too small. And, again, as you browse around it clobbers the existing window sizes of other folders.

Create a new folder on the desktop, then double click. You'll get that tiny default browser window. Now navigate up to your home folder. You just clobbered your preferred home folder window size.

The end result is that when you open a Finder window, you never know what you're going to get.

A distinct difference in behavior is that OS X+ Finder has the ability to view the same folder in multiple windows, which is a necessity if you're going to keep the miller column view.

Classic Mac OS Finder did not allow this. Every time you opened a new folder, a new window would open. If you navigated to a folder already open, the previous window would jump to the front. That's how spatial Finder worked so well. It's difficult to combine both these patterns. It's one of the reasons people felt Mac OS "just worked" without necessarily being able to elaborate as to why.

There was no Mac OS 7. You mean System 7.

There was Mac OS 7.6.

That isn’t Mac OS 7.

Mac OS 7.6 was a precursor to Mac OS 8 and released in the era where Apple was working on Rhapsody. System 7 was released in 1991.

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