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Comment by fefzero | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I can't stand Finder. I used a Mac for several years every day before I felt like I really figured it out, and even then I didn't feel like it was user-friendly - it just felt incapable of doing many advanced things (for example, how would you "copy path" in Finder?).

Not only can you hide the buttons in the ribbon (which is nice if you typically use keyboard shortcuts), but the experience is consistent with other recent Microsoft applications. I'm not sure a computer novice or even 50% or more of non-power users would have any idea what the buttons on Finder do (does anyone know what that eye button does before they click on it?), and I think that's the target demographic here. Power users know how to hide unwanted buttons or the text that goes with the buttons.

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You can get the a file’s path by dragging it into any text field. But what do you need that for? Besides the terminal (where dragging works, too) the only use case I can think of is troubleshooting.

I'm glad I'm not alone. That weird columnar view mode (don't know the term for it) shown in the screenshot from the GP has to be the worst aspect of the Finder. I've been seriously considering getting a Mac laptop and now someone goes and reminds me about the Finder. But presumably there are 3rd party tools that fix the problem, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Columns

Some people swear by Miller columns for efficiency and are lost at sea without them. It's entirely a personal preference - if you don't like it, click on one of the other available layouts in the finder.

I really like the column view. Why don't you like it?

I don't like it because it's very wasteful of screen real-estate. I do want to see directory hierarchy, but I don't want my files list to be squeezed into smaller and smaller space so I can see lists of every sibling folder of every folder in the path down to the folder that I'm viewing. This view isn't useful in proportion with how much space it takes up. IMO, access to directory structure works better as a treeview, separate from the 'current folder' view, rather than as a new column for each step down into the hierarchy. The latter doesn't scale well.

Is something like this better?

http://homepage.mac.com/jdarnold/ars-m/finder_ec.jpg

If so, that view has been available in Finder since at least the first version of OS X I've used which would be 10.3 Panther. These days there are 4 different view you could browse files with in Finder: regular icons, cover flow (does anybody use this ever, by the way? it's the most long-winded, annoying and imprecise to browse anything including photos), column view and hierarchical view.

I was responding to the fact that someone put forward the column view as an example of how Finder was prettier than the Windows 8 Explorer, so yes, I do know that Finder has multiple modes. I would prefer a mode that doesn't conflate the folder navigation UI with the current folder view like that mode that you just mentioned. That'd be a better balance in terms of emphasis on the two aspects of working with a file system.

And yeah - cover flow - classic eye candy bollocks UI.

Huh, column view is one of the things I missed most from Finder. I loved how you could click and hold a file, and navigate through a directory tree just by hovering over each folder in the path.

More important than how you copy the path of an item in the Finder, why?

Sending the path to a shared network drive file on chat... (I don't want to send the file)

Also, how do you drag and drop to a terminal that's fullscreen?

Cmd-C, Cmd-V.

Works like a charm.

What a ridiculous question. There are lots of reasons I might want to do that. Storing file paths in a text file for later bookkeeping and copying file paths to a Google search box while trying to debug something are two I can immediately think of.

But how often do you really need to do that? For me, it's once every few months. It's okay for rarely-needed features to be less accessible or a bit harder to use. I understand that getting at the textual path of an object is generally a bit easier in Windows Explorer than in the Finder, but I don't know of any common workflow in OS X that requires it, so I don't understand why it's getting decried as a notable problem with the Finder.

I find it strange that this didactic "You don't need that feature" seems to be considered a valid argument in the OSX camp.

The feature does exist, it just isn't as accessible as some people would prefer. There's an opportunity cost to almost any UI change, so it is perfectly valid to ask whether a feature is useful, important, and popular enough to justify making it easier to use at the expense of making something else harder to use.

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