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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

MacOS is really bad abut this sort of thing. It fails on discoverability. For instance, how do you navigate to a hidden folder in the file-selection dialog? There is no option to show hidden, and there is no place to input the exact path. You must know two things to proceed: That there is a secret hotkey to allow exact path specification, and what that hotkey is. It took me years to learn that there was a hotkey -- I just assumed that it was not possible.

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> You must know two things to proceed: That there is a secret hotkey to allow exact path specification, and what that hotkey is. It took me years to learn that there was a hotkey -- I just assumed that it was not possible.

There's also menu item in the Finder menu - you know, that thing on the upper edge of the screen - Go | Go to folder... and it also gives away the secret hotkey.

There is no Finder menu in the upper edge when you are in the file-selection dialog of some random app.

It does fail on discoverability but there is a great feature of MacOS to compensate. The help->search function (shortcut key: Command-shift-/). I wish it was more prominent, like the quake console[1] or autocad command bar[2].

[1]Come to think of it, I used to have iTerm set up for this, I really must reconfigure it.

[2]https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore...

Isn't the macos of 2022 just a very shiny thing to browse the web with, plus a linuxy terminal?

I always do file operations from the terminal if I can help it (won't save you when you need to select a file in a gui I suppose)

10+ years of owning macs, and Finder still bugs the hell out of me.

I find most of macOS reasonably well designed (at least compared to the competition), but Finder is truly awful. I highly recommend Forklift as Finder replacement.

Thanks for the Forklift recommendation. I've used Path Finder off and on for years, and it has some advantages over regular finder. But it doesn't seem to have enough differences, and their distinguishing features are not readily apparent. Path Finder also has features like upload to S3, but they put that under the menu (Commands -> upload to ).

Will definitely give Forklift a try.

You can set this permanently at the terminal with:

  defaults write -g AppleShowAllFiles yes

or to always see the hidden files in the Finder:

  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles yes

use `defaults` to see and set a number of preferences that are not apparent. Around the turn of the century Mac OS started moving to streamline the UX and making it more difficult to change (and possibly break) things in that process; for better or worse. I remember the discoverability of user settings/preferences and tools/utilities being much easier using the finder and menu bars in the 90's. Now, one is forced to get comfortable with the command line to have that level of control and customization.

Thanks for these tips. I have often resorted to making symlinks to hidden folders (dotssh -> .ssh, dotconfig -> .config) because I don't feel like looking up the KB shortcut.

One additional note: after setting the defaults, if you want it to take place immediately, you need to kill finder.

    killall Finder

> MacOS is really bad abut this sort of thing. It fails on discoverability.

It's not just Macs. Just about everything in "modern" UIs fail discoverability.

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