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> Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.

Absolutely file usage has declined, even among power users.

My god, two decades ago everything was files -- my MP3 collection, all the photos I'd ever taken, everything I'd ever written. My whole life organization was based around organizing files inside of folders.

Now it's all Spotify, Photos, Docs. Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god. A handful of playlists, starred items, a handful of folders for select projects, and that's it.

And then all of the power user stuff, when it comes to coding or otherwise advanced processing of files with data? It's all command-line now, also thank god -- you can do pretty much anything you want, rather than be limited to the feature set of your secondary file manager. The command line was pretty limited in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Now we're thankfully in a different era.

> Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god

Huh. At the very least I use both and couldn't live without both. Especially the really nice, super-subjective folder hierarchies that I built myself and know like the back of my hand...whether local or in the cloud. No clutter, no folders with thousands of different loose files.

I still use vifm as a filemanager a lot, and couldn't do without it. Bulk renaming of files, moving and categorizing downloaded files (documents, books, music, ...). A lot of stuff that I download gets cleaned up periodically unless it's properly categorized and tucked away. What do you use for that? I do use fzf to search, but it's so much easier with vifm. vifm also makes bulk operations on filenames a breeze with vi keybindings

Search is useful, but image search is vastly inferior to proper organization. Whenever I search for an image using Google or Apple, I never find what I'm looking for. I may find something related to the event, but never the actual photo. The photo might as well be lost.

The sole advantage to search, is that no one properly organizes their photos beyond something like date.

I honestly can't imagine how this is true, but of course, experience is a hell of a filter.

I use search for everything (though a lot of the time some folders is all that is needed), and Google Photos is a sin greater than Central Air (#Dogma).

If you tag faces, Google Photos will go out of its way to find decades old photos of the same person and merge that tag for easy search. It will periodically ask me to validate that a half face in the background from 2004 matches the same person in a full portrait from 2018.

I search a loved one, scene or year to go with it and nearly always get what I want back. It gives me Star Trek vibes.

If you tag things you're effectively recreating an organizational hierarchy, just with labels instead of literal folders.

Plain search itself will always lack the feedback you get from the semantics you create by organizing things, unless you attach metadata to your search in some way. Simple example, you look for a math paper in your paper directory, and you find an even better one that you didn't remember. Of course recommender systems in search help with some of this, but search is mostly literal, it doesn't make connections the way you can.

Spotify can give you some popular punk bands that are like the ones you like, but it's unlikely to give you that one record from the local band that nobody else listens to that you manually curated in your playlist 12 years ago.

Image search has a recall problem. This is obvious if you search for a specific photo.

I have a photo of my daughter as a toddler wearing a red vest or coat that reads, “Coca-Cola Security Forces” (She was a child soldier in the Cola Wars. Thank her for her service.) I can not search for that photo. I know the picture was taken at my house, but only vaguely when. If I search for her name and location, I’ll get thousands of photos. If I add some years, I get fewer, but not necessarily the one I’m looking for. Add some content descriptors like “red vest” or “red coat”, it’s totally random. Search for the words on the coat? Lol. That’s not indexed. If I breakdown and scroll through the list of thousands of photos, it’s not there.

Why isn’t it there? I have no idea. Maybe it’s not facially tagged? Maybe it just ranked low in some algo? No clue. No way even to figure it out. I have to resort scrolling through every photo for the date range to find it.

It sucks.

I switched from Mac OS X to Linux (Debian) a bit more than 15 years ago. At this time on Mac OS X I was barely using the Finder at all, I spent all my time in the Terminal and managed my files from there.

Once on Linux, I didn't even bother to install a file manager at all, I just kept using the terminal. My environment consisted in Openbox as a window manager, rxvt-unicode as a terminal with Bash as a shell, and then mostly Emacs and Firefox (considering only graphical programs).

A few years ago, maybe 2 or 3 I'm not sure, I decided to try to experience Linux the way "muggles" do, because I was always telling people to use it but I actually never properly used what they would if they followed my advice, i.e., Gnome or KDE. So I read a bit, compared the two, and decided to give a try to KDE.

It was a bit of a pain at the beginning, so my first move was to configure everything so that my usual key bindings worked again, but I quickly found that I could be as efficient and at ease as I was before using KDE Apps as they were intended to be used (I even switched from doing my emails in Emacs to using a graphical email client!).

Switching from managing files in the terminal to using Dolphin has been an amazing experience. Dolphin is probably one of my favorite piece of software today. And for things that are better done using a shell, you have a terminal at your fingertips anytime anywhere with all your settings from Konsole (the actual terminal app) thanks to the fantastic KParts framework. It even works transparently with remote mount over ftps thanks to KIO. Truly this is amazing.

It made me love a file manager, which is not something that I would have thought possible a few years back, or the years before that.

Nowadays I'm slowly switching from Emacs to Kate (this is a bit hard and has lead me to become a small KDE contributor to improve Kate and the underlying KTextEditor ^^).

ftps isn't an interesting widely used protocol, its legacy. You probably meant sftp, a subsystem for SSH which got nothing to do with FTP or FTP over SSL (ftps).

Both Konqueror (later Dolphin) and Nautilus have supported mounting remote SSH for ages. Yeah, its nice. On Windows you can do same with Dokan, and on Linux and macOS CLI with Fuse. I mount a USB stick on Linux with CLI, and I mount a remote SSH with CLI. Tiling window manager and endless terminals. Tho its possible to make KDE tiling, too.

For those who like Sublime Text (command palette) and dual pane file manager I can recommend the cross-platform fman.

Yes thanks, I meant SFTP :).

But my point was mainly that in Dolphin I can open a terminal panel in the directory I'm in, and that this works even for mounted remote directories. Which is frankly quite awesome :).

> There was a pretty huge market of shareware (or open source on linux) for this.

Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.

>Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.

I certainly get your point of view. As a long time Unix/Linux user, I find that the standard tools (as you mention) are great, and I use them most of the time.

However, when dealing with large numbers of files/folders and being responsible for their organization/storage, a tool such as MidnightCommander[0][1] can be quite useful.

If that's not your use case and/or other tools work better for you, that's great!

I'd posit that (lack of) prior experience may impact such choices. But IMHO, whatever gets the job done is perfectly fine.

[0] https://github.com/MidnightCommander

[1] https://midnight-commander.org/

> Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle

Linux has plenty of file managers. Just like the system that ran the original norton commander had copy/dir/etc.

Where does a "lifestyle" come in here?

I'd guess that the proportion of linux users who prefer to use the terminal for file management over a GUI is way higher than MacOS or Windows ones. It's not a property of the system itself, but more that someone who prefers to do things this way would be more likely to use linux than the average user. Hence...lifestyle

I totally get your point of view. Had the same, did the same.

If one day you want to try a graphical file manager, I suggest Dolphin. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32336338 :).

I do have nautilus installed, and I use it for exactly one directory: my images stored in Dropbox. Occasionally I'll be looking for a certain photo or screenshot or something and I won't remember the exact name, so it's easier to scan the images visually from preview icons rather than try to figure it out from the entire list of names.

I used to use feh for this kind of things.

What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day? I download stuff to my Desktop or Downloads folder and regularly delete it, but that's only when it's not in a package manager. Beyond that, everything's managed by editors/IDEs/web-apps, and code mostly has established hierarchies that don't change too often. Something has to go horribly wrong for me to ever want to do major surgery on files like a deep copy of a directory, especially in the age of git. The last major copy operation I did was moving my Steam library, which Steam did itself.

Back in the day with Midnight Commander and lynx key bindings, it was a nice way to quickly navigate around a codebase and see what's up, but these days I'd probably do that on GitHub. Even before that, my main use of Norton Commander was editing Windows startup files, and creating a parallel cable connection to my brother's PC to play DOOM. I can't remember the last time I opened my file manager tbh.

Sorry you're not the use case for this. I cut/copy/delete/move files hundreds of times per day, across both local and remote disks. And I use editors, IDEs, and git, too. But the files I cut/copy/delete/move have little or nothing to do with software development.

It would perhaps be useful then if you actually describe your use cases

I still appreciate having a tool like ranger for emacs: https://github.com/ralesi/ranger.el

It's not quite the two-column file manager; but it's inspired by a file manager + preview, with simple keybindings for navigating.

> What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day?

Copying stuff out of my Downloads folder, for one. I tried doing that with MacOs' Alfred for a while (select in finder -> shortcut -> fuzzy search destination -> move to), but a decent enough bookmark system in a two-panel folder works better for me.

I also often just dump new documents in a standard location and reorganize it later, as that's more user friendly than your average file requester and postpones one of IT and life's hard problems.

All in all, pretty similar to what I did on my 286. There's a little bit more file search involved (at least on my Mac, less so on Linux) and iTunes/cdrip/beets took a lot of effort out of organizing music.

Sure, I don't need a secondary fm for that, but then again, I don't really need a git client/IDE, either.

Among other things I use it for logs: to reach them, to copy them, to find them and to view them. They are just files, not tied to your ide or webapp, and can come from any kind of location.

Keyword search can't replace file navigation. It works like unix way: you must know in advance what to find, but why I would need to find what I already know?

I wonder the same (I've been using 2-panel FMs since late 80s). My guess is that younger devs got more familiar with the command line and some are not even aware they could do file operations even faster and in a more efficient way. Non-devs just rarely use files anymore, everything is being done in a browser or on their mobile devices.

Sure, more powerful/common command line usage is one reason why the default file managers are sufficient. So in a way, Norton Commander lost while NDOS won.

And of course I can't speak for "old" Mac users (I started in the 00s). Back in the Norton/DOpus days, I didn't know that many, so maybe they always were satisfied with the Finder?

Siracusa’s rants about the old Spatial Finder aside, I have really found that the Column view satisfies most of my needs quite easily. Especially if you just open up two windows when you need to move files from one place to another.

Tagging stuff and using saved searches for it is really nice too, Classic had tags but search was a lot slower. It’s really nice to decide which of my illustration commissions I want to work on today by opening a saved search for everything with the “commission” and “in progress” tags, sorted by last modification date, with big icons.

Not sure. I am ok with command line but can not imagine my life without 2 panel FM. TotalCmd on Windows and Double Commander on Linux desktop or Midnight Commander on text mode. In fact Midnight Commander is the first one I install on any fresh Linux.

> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems, too. Back in the days, pretty much any "power user" had their own favorite replacement for the built-in stop gap solution.

That's because typical everyday workflows became more on-line and less filesystem-centric this way. The proportion of "power user" is also much smaller today, most of the computer users are ordinary people and don't even have a solid understanding of what a file is.

> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems

I would credit that with actually functional OS-level search (Mac OSX 10.5, Win7). Why bother sorting stuff hierarchically when you can dump it all in a /Downloads /Movies /Music folder and let search find it for you?

It probably also coincides with the rise of mobile devices where the paradigm is app-based not file-based.

I think because the metaphor went from being file-centric (you choose the file, you launch the app) to app-centric (you open the app, then open the file). It's not exactly applicable to the file manager arena but I guess most users do not need to manage files, they let their apps do it for them.

I started with Norton Commander under MS DOS in 1990-s. I am still using a Far Manager on Windows. It is completely keyboard-based, and I see from the experience that my file operations are 2-3 times more effective then of my peers using system file managers with mouse (or, even worse, touchpad).

I have a years old system of file storage in my home directory, mostly for code: Github, Gitlab, work projects, pet projects etc. Also Downloads folder is there by default. It is much like using a console, but with greater visibility and pre-defined shortcuts for frequent operations.

What to use on macOS instead of Finder?

I've been happily using Forklift for years. https://binarynights.com/

By far the best file manager for MacOS is Marta [1]. It is the only app that is close to great old Far Manager, which sadly only works properly on Windows (it does have Linux and MacOS ports, but they are quite far from working smoothly on these platforms).

[1]: https://marta.sh/

This looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I guess it doesnt require any additional steps in terms of replacing Finder, just install and play?

Yes, pretty much.

Am deeply chagrinned I didn't know about Marta. Thank you!

Seamless archive support FTW.

Also: Marta's config DSL syntax is the closest to The Correct Answer™ I've seen so far. Further confirming author Zhulanow's good taste and technical accumen. https://marta.sh/images/features/config.png

Downloading now. Thanks again.

I’ve never heard of Marta before, but I’m going to try it out. The clean DSL for configuration looks good, and I have to agree that GUI configuration interfaces can be very irksome. (I feel like throwing out my networking gear after using the GUI to set up VLANs—just give me access to the config file that is hidden somewhere.)

Path Finder is my current alternative. It has quirks, but is preferable to Finder.