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Comment by shrumm | Hacker News Reader

my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows.

- you can drag that file anywhere to move it.

- CMD click it to see a breadcrumb menu showing where it is and navigate to the folder

on a similar vein, dragging a file into an open file modal box makes it browse to the containing folder. In windows, dragging a file would move the file into that folder.

I combine the above two quite a bit. Editing a file in app A, need to upload it somewhere via browser. Drag file from title bar into open dialog box, done.

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> my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows.

This behaviour seems to come 'for free', so, when it breaks, I can only assume that it's intentionally broken. One of the many ways that Adobe Acrobat violates the design language on macOS is by making this somehow not work. (They also break print to PDF–I guess because otherwise you wouldn't pay for the PDF creation capabilities—and do their absolute best to make sure you don't access the native print settings, which is fun because Adobe's own print settings don't play well with the printer accounting software at $WORK).

Demos of all the drag and drop behavior can be seen in the Aqua keynote. Lots of people don’t know how powerful it is on macOS even though it was THE big feature at launch.

>- CMD click it to see a breadcrumb menu showing where it is and navigate to the folder

Similarly you can right click the window title (click with two fingers on the touchpad) for this functionality. It's very useful to navigating up in the folder hierarchy in Finder without adding any new icons to the toolbar.

You can even drag the file into a terminal window to turn it into the full path.

Also works with copy-paste from Finder into Terminal (or iTerm). Love that feature

I hate hate hate that they're hiding proxy icons in Big Sur.

Proxy icons?

The icon in the window title bar is often referred to as the proxy icon. I thought this was Apple's official name for it, but I can't find any evidence to support that in Apple's documentation.

Damn, what a bummer. Is there any way to re-enable it?

I've read that you can hover over the spot and it'll appear.

It appears almost instantly when you mouse over where it used to be. I've been living on it for the past few weeks and haven't changed my muscle memory at all.

> my favourite feature is how the title bar icon in any app that’s editing a file (textmate/ word etc) is a pointer to the actual file unlike windows. you can drag that file anywhere to move it.

I knew about this feature but it took me about a year or two of using macOS every day and the feature only working about 50% of the time before I understood how to get it to work reliably.

For those, like me, who were having problems: You have to click and hold the mouse button over the window, then hold the mouse there for a short period of time (e.g. half a second), then drag. If you drag too quickly it'll move the window instead.

I also like how you can usually rename or move an open file and the app that has it open updates itself.

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