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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

> It is by far the worst file manager out of all of the OSes out there.

Much better than Windows file explorer.

I sort of agree. Explorer is weird, half-baked. The side bar doesn't work 100%, no tags, loading icons is sloooooow, it doesn't auto-update. It tries to be the Finder and the old Explorer at the same time, but I'm not convinced by the result. And the properties dialog might have been new in 2002, but it's antiquated by now. I can get work done with it, though. It's not horrible (like those old Gnome file managers).

> Much better than Windows file explorer

I spend most of my time on my Air running Ventura, and love it, but the Windows file explorer on my Windows 11 machine is way better. Though obviously opinions vary.

Finder is terrible compared to Explorer, it is insanely unreliable. Often the VFS will get completely broken and claim that files don't exist when you try to open them, fail to allow renaming or opening files on network shares, etc. It's also dog slow. It's abysmally slow at generating file thumbnails especially when files are changing due to some other process. Often quicklook will get completely locked up and require kill-9'ing before thumbnails will appear again. It has other weird bugs like not showing thumbnails for search results in some cases eg. on network shares.

Finder has some nice features compared to Explorer but the actual quality of its coding seems to be terrible for what is probably the most important piece of userspace software on one of the 2 main commercial desktop OSs in existence.

Do you have any system extensions or something like antivirus software installed? None of that is normal.

Not really. I have a few thumbnail provider extensions installed but they shouldn't cause these issues.

I am pretty sure these things are 'normal' - they are reported around the internet. Just look at the article - bugs in Finder are hardly unprecedented.

My gripe is that the Finder is still full of O[n] or even n^2 algorithms, which worked fine in 1990 when people had maybe 1000 files on the entire filesystem. But nowadays, 10 million files is a small file system. And O[n+] just doesn't cut it.

Sometimes you can't do better than O[n], in which case you sweat the details of that inner loop very hard. Finder doesn't sweat much of anything.

Any time I have to do something to a few thousand files or more I switch to the Terminal and use the command line because Unix [mostly] knows how to deal with large numbers of files efficiently.

Not even joking, Explorer.exe is looking far superior to Finder these days.

I just want a file explorer that actually works.

Not quite. In windows I can right click and refresh the view. Macos is stuck with the idea that there will be no issues, everything works perfectly, you don't need a refresh button (but you do).

Holy cow, that's one of my biggest annoyances with Apple operating systems. Apple assumes their OSs can never have errors and does no wrong, therefore everything is dumbed down as you, the user, don't need to see error messages, progress bars, way to refresh or trigger firmware checks/updates, etc, just trust that their OS will always work flawlessly. Except no software is ever flawless, least of all their latest OS.

Why not just have a hidden 'power user' toggle in the OS to enable these things?

The problem is that Apple has become a consumer focused company. Power users are a tiny percentage of the customers. So they focus on the glitz and marketing. Top management are part of the consumer class, so they can't relate to the engineering / power user concerns. Accounting tells them that it doesn't matter enough.

Ug, no. I've always hated how Apple refuses to put a "go up to parent folder" button in Finder. Every workaround I've tried just sucks. I don't want to right click the title at the top, I don't want to use list view, I want a simple button. Windows, by comparison, shows the whole path and lets you click on any point on it, and also provides the button. There's other issues I have with Finder, but this one alone leaves me wishing for Explorer almost every time I use it.

Two solutions:

1) Cmd + Up

2) View > Show Path Bar

I always enable Path and Status bar on all my macOS devices

If you don't mind hotkeys, I eventually discovered that cmd+up arrow will take you to the parent folder.

I just cannot even agree more with this. When I use Windows, I put FreeCommander on it at once. And File Explorer is far, far worse in Windows 11 than Windows 10. Finder is crap, but it makes sense, in the way that every other single-pane file explorer on Linux makes sense. Path Finder is better, though its buggy, and worth the money.

"Yeah well, that's just like, your opinion maaan." - The Dude

But in all seriousness, disagree.

Latest Windows Explorer release slaps Finder with a 3 foot stick.

I wish Explorer had QuickLook -- pressing spacebar in Finder is super handy.

PowerToys adds command-space, which is a start. Any QuickLook apps on Win10? (Does Win11 have this?)

wow, when I typed my response, yours wasn't visible yet. great minds and what not i guess!

Also wish Explorer supported paths longer than 259 characters, after all these years. (Did Win11 fix this?)

The file system supports 260+... the files are there. Just can't interact with them graphically.

Try FreeCommander. Not just with quicklook (Ctrl-Q) but dual panes as well.

Can you press the spacebar on a selected file and get a quick look at it without launching the default associated app without any 3rd party programs? If not, it's broken.

Not as broken as not having a file tree view or a file path being shown. You know, stuff since Windows 95 or KDE 1.0.

But yeah, quick preview, as nice as it is, was never a Windows thing, and i doubt it will ever be, as I assume Apple has some software parents for it as they have for several basic UX and software features.

You can sort of get the path via "breadcrumbs":

> The breadcrumb is called Path Bar in Finder, and you can enable it in the View menu, with the Enable Path Bar menu item (Alt+Command+P).

> The Path Bar is displayed on the bottom of the Finder window, and you have to double-click onto the folder names to navigate to the desired folder.

> https://gyorgybalassy.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/mac-tips-for-...

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