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Comment by tomtheelder | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing at all wrong with the behavior, and it's perfectly logical once you understand what is going on, but it's certainly not intuitive. It's a bit of an odd mental model that's (as far as I can tell) specific to OSX.

I find OSX to be generally pretty logical and easy to understand, but certainly no more _intuitive_ than something like Windows. Another way of saying this: if I took someone who didn't know how to use a desktop OS, I wouldn't be any more confident sitting them down in front of a Mac.

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I don't think desktop GUIs can or should be 'intuitive'.

They should be consistent, discoverable, and customizable.

I give macOS full marks for consistency, and a passing grade for customizable, but it's hardly discoverable! I read these kinds of HN posts because of all the little tips and tricks I find.

Operating systems used to come with a thick manual, and you could buy an even thicker "missing manual" book at the local bookstore. macOS could use one of those.

> consistent, discoverable

I think that's what 'intuitive' means, practically, in this context.

I think he quoted intuitive because that's an effectively meaningless claim. To someone who spent two decades in Windows, everything Windows-like will be "intuitive". That doesn't make it a universal truth.

The concepts in Windows used to translate to the physical world. "Buttons" and "Menus." Sure, to an alien species, these things are unintuitive, but no more so than a door knob.

Of course, physical things are losing buttons. I guess kids will refer to things as 'tap the tappy spot' or some such.

I actually find MacOS applications far more discoverable than equivalent windows or Unix tools. That's precisely thanks to the consistent menu structure, which always includes a help menu with a search option, including both the help files as well as the menu itself. Having help show you where to find a particular option so you can learn it for next time is precisely what I want.

It's better than nothing, and yeah, probably better than the competition as well.

But then there are core features like "a file icon on a document window can be dragged exactly like a file icon in the finder" that you can use macOS for years and never find. That's before they started hiding the file icons in Big Sur!

macOS is packed with little things like that.

Or, that you can Cmd+click on the document icon or name in any titlebar to pull up a menu of its containing directories. This one is _super_ handy and has zero discoverability.

It still works in Big Sur! Just hover over the window title and the icon (called the "document proxy icon") will appear.

I think it's fine that they hid it, since even before, the things you can do with it (dragging, cmd/ctrl-clicking) were already hidden.

The only old functionality that is lost with Big Sur is that you could glance at the icon to see if there are unsaved changes (if so, the icon would be dimmed). But you can still tell by looking for the dot in the red close button.

I had no idea one could do this!

Can you give some examples of applications you're comparing?

it doesn't really depend on the application. every MacOS application has a menu in the same style, and with the menu & help file spotlight search that I described. I find almost no Windows app has something equivalent (as in a menu search), plus they have a multitude of differently shaped menus with various guidelines for how to structure them.

To be honest, the programs I use commonly like Discord, Streamlabs OBS, Ramme, Typora and Poddr haven't really been good for that.

I don't find key bindings in MacOS consistent. The first thing I started missing from Windows is the F2 button for renaming things. I can do that everywhere in Windows. In Mac there's no keyboard shortcut for it, so probably I could add it in Finder, but it probably won't work in other file dialogs (or maybe yes).

The return key is functionally the same as F2 in Windows.

Thanks, in Windows that starts the program, but I guess there's another key for that...I'll have to experiment more. I love my M1 Macbook Pro so much that I want to get used to the OS.

It's CMD+Down arrow.

One thing that's killer for me in MacOS vs Windows, regarding consistency, is text fields. They always behave the same (except, of course, for weird apps, say ms office). CMD+Backspace will delete a whole word even in password fields or system settings, etc. This is always hit or miss in Windows. I know it doesn't work for passwords. In Windows explorer it works... sometimes. It works in the address bar, but not in the preferences or when renaming a file.

You can use Cmd+o to open a program (and the "return" key to rename it).

It sounds like these combinations wouldn't work in a file selector for example, but I will try them.

> I don't think desktop GUIs can or should be 'intuitive'.

why ?

> There's nothing at all wrong with the behavior, and it's perfectly logical once you understand what is going on, but it's certainly not intuitive.

I find the "app-less desktop" of Windows and all the Linux DE's I've tried (i.e. the big ones) far more weird and infuriating. It's easy to lose context of what app is focused, since a slight dimming of buttons isn't quite as obvious as I'd like. Reading the word of the app in the menu bar, even if it's just through my peripheral vision, makes the focus behavior far more obvious.

And an "app-less desktop" more or less necessitates that you now dedicate an entire meta/super/Windows/whatever key to the window manager, which is just such a waste of keyboard real estate, as well as a driver for key command inconsistency. In macOS, Cmd+N will (nearly) always make a new window for the app that you're in; Cmd+W will close it; Cmd+Q will quit it. In Windows, Cmd+N works for everything, but to make my first file explorer window, I have to hit Windows+E. And to quit an app, it's...Alt+F4, for some reason?

The trickle-down effects of this design are endless -- I've just laid out the basics of the basics here.

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