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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Windows users who switch to macOS will complain that their new shiny and expensive machine won't let them to go through their photos in a folder using the arrow keys and they have to open the photos one by one. Then you tell them to hit the space when a photo is selected, they first look at the keyboard then at the screen and they are like "O.K. that will work", you proceed to tell them to try it on a PDF or something else and that's the moment they recognise the value that they paid for :)

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Well damn, I’ve been a mac user for 6 years now and this is the first time I hear about this option haha and it was one of my main complains

For me, that moment was uninstalling an app.

I had to Google it.

“Drag the app to the trash bin.”

Remember how hard it is to uninstall stuff on Windows? Especially if you’re doing more than one?

I’m a Linux and Mac OS user myself and I’m sorry to say it’s never as easy as that, there is a lot left behind and very difficult to know what exactly to clean up if you built and install yourself

Some settings can be left behind, but AppCleaner[1] will find them.

[1] https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

Why do we need a third party app to clean leftover files?

Dragging is cool, but doesn't make the uninstall process better than Windows apparently

Most are self-contained and don’t leave behind anything significant when the application package is deleted.

It's... not hard at all to uninstall stuff on Windows. They'll all be in the Apps & Features list.

I don't understand either. The lingering files left over after I deleted a .app would always require a third party tool to gather and clean, and even then, I wouldn't be sure, and would then find missing preferences files. I don't have that problem with the Windows uninstaller.

I may be missing something, but aren't you describing Finder's Gallery View? In that mode, you can left/right arrow your way through the entire set of files in a folder, viewing each one (image or pdf or whatever).

Gallery view is pretty new and still needs to be discovered. Also not very convenient just for quickly viewing bunch of files. The view of the folder changes completely, so you get disoriented and if it's a large folder you will need t skim through one line of folders to find what you are looking for. It's good for certain use cases but it doesn't help with quickly going through some files in a large folder.

On Windows, when you open a photo by clicking it, you can go to the next/prev one using the arrow keys and on macOS you can't do that. So the Windows immigrants get annoyed, naturally.

On Mac, you can simply select a single file anywhere and hitting pace will very quickly show you the contents, hit space again and you are back to the folder. You can use the arrow keys to skim around and the file contents will be quickly displayed. If you first select a bunch of files and then hit space, it will loop though your selection when you use the arrow keys.

It's a very convenient feature to skim through the files in a folder.

Hitting space and then arrow key doesn't seem to navigate to different photos. Is that what you're saying should be possible?

Select a file, not necessarily a photo, hit space and a Quicklook window displaying the contents should appear. When you change file (through clicking to another file or using the arrow keys), the quicklook should update to display that file.

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