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Comment by i_cannot_hack | Hacker News Reader

> Why does it try to pretend like there is no filesystem?

I've seen this complaint before from Windows users interacting with Finder, but I've never understood where it is coming from.

Aside from the "Recents" tab, everything is organized into files and folders, just like any other file system explorer. The sidebar is mostly shortcuts to different folders, and I always navigate down in a nested folder hierarchy to find my files.

Is it that the "Recents" tab is the default view that gives this impression?

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You can drag the icons to the terminal to directly use the path. Also if you use the command ”open” it does the same as double clicking in finder.

I want all my folders everywhere to be in column view, sorted by Kind and Name. Nope. You can't set that for the whole system.

And this drives me nuts :)

You can. Cmd+J will let you choose defaults system wide. This will be overruled if there are local settings manually selected for a specific folder.

If you want to force system wide view settings in finder, delete all DS_Store files and then do the thing with cmd+j

Cmd+J never worked for me system wide. Tough it looks like it may be working in the latest Catalina versions.

Can confirm still broken in catalina.

Officially that’s true, but I’ve been running OSX since at least .8, and in practice it just does not honour the “I want all finder windows like this” ideal.

I'm a Linux user. All I need are paths, and they're hidden.

Unfortunately I have to interact with finder when I want to use things like Firefox or Jetbrains IDEs.

You can't traverse the filesystem tree without descending and then reascending, and for complex paths it's impossible to know where you're going.

Finder is garbage at finding and exploring.

You can bring up the path and change it with Shift+Cmd+G when you need it.

As I posted elsewhere in these comments, this does not bring up the current path. To get the current path (into your clipboard, but not into any text field) you can hit Cmd+Opt+C.

You're correct that this does not bring up the current path. Unfortunately it's too late for me to edit.

Cmd+Opt+C on the other hand does not copy the current path into my clipboard.

Over here it copies the current path or the path to the currently selected file, which is frustrating. My hammerspoon script that tries to do cmd+l has now grown to 5 hotkeys, one of which is executed only conditionally.

You can set it to always show the current path via View > Show Path Bar

I actually use finder quite a lot for previewing. Like all the time.

I have the downloads folder in the dock and use it frequently.

For starters, I think in the Finder there is no way to see your current path, a file's path or to manipulate the path with the keyboard.

You need to click on the icon/folder name in the top bar.

You can see your current path on the bottom of the window if you enable it in the options of Finder. But you can just click it, you can't actually edit it and hit enter to go to a different path. We simply don't have the technology yet ;)

There's a "Show Path Bar" setting accessible from the View menu in Finder. You can see the file's path right from the Get Info menu and drag and drop it into a terminal or whatever and have the path immediately available. You can copy a file's path by holding the option key with the right click menu is open.

It's pretty accessible. Most of the complaints I see regarding Finder seem to be a result of trying to use a Mac in the same way as another OS. It's different, but takes just a quick search to find all the shortcuts and stuff and it's very simple.

These are great Finder tips, but they all involve the mouse, which I find mildly infuriating.

Command-Option-C: copy the full path of the selected file or folder as plaintext, with space characters not escaped with backslashes.

Command-C, then Command-V into a terminal prompt: paste the full path of the copied file or folder, with space characters backslash-escaped. Tested in Terminal and iTerm2.

You can set it to always show the current path via View > Show Path Bar (it's interactable, although unfortunately it's not editable like text).

You can make finder show the current path (including file path) with Cmd+Option+P. You can manipulate the path with Cmd+Shift+G. These options are also right there in the menus.

Did you even use Finder or are you just trolling?

Cmd+Shift+G does not seem to default to the current location. Over here, I just tried it and got ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. I haven't been there in months. So it's a significant step down from hitting Cmd+L in a browser.

The actual keyboard shortcut, if you'd like to reproduce the behavior you get with Cmd+L in a browser, is Cmd+Opt+C Cmd+Shift+G Cmd+V.

You can start typing a relative path and that works from the directory you're in. If you have folder/sub and you are in folder, you can type 'sub/' to enter it. Only navigating up is not possible I think.

In file dialogs, like saving a file, you can start typing a path and it will pop up. You can also drag and drop a folder into the save dialog to save it there.

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