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Comment by pancrufty | Hacker News Reader

Clearly it’s not invisible. While you can’t target it by typing ~/Dropbox, people using the Finder won’t notice a difference.

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In the update process Dropbox moves the folder to the new location and creates ~/Dropbox as a symbolic link to the new location. So you cd ~/Dropbox

OK nice. A symlink will go a long way for the average user. The way I read the article it seemed like they would rely solely on the Locations list in finder sidebars.

If a user can't open or target a folder by typing in the location, it's useless for any meaningful file management. This feels like macOS is becoming more like iOS instead of the other way around. There is a setting to re-enable it, but it shouldn't need a setting.

Finder -> Go -> Go to Folder ..

And being able to open a file by its path is not a requirement for meaningful file management.

It's something only power users would do and for them the Terminal is always going to be a far better choice.

That's a very low bar to set for "power user". By that standard even users wanting to install Dropbox and managing files themselves would be enough to count as a "power user". Recommending the use of a terminal is even more of a regression. It's not a far better choice, it's not even a good choice for file management. Basically everything is slower through a terminal interface.

I feel like if you're a power user you're generally going to reach for the terminal.

Although I do like the "Go To Server" thing in the menu bar when you're in Finder. Easier than remembering the ftp command to do whatever. Plus I can look at FTP directories as if they were just files on my local drive. But other than that... I can't think of 1 single other thing that I would rather do in Finder vs. a terminal of whatever flavor I'm feeling that moment (Alacritty, iTerm, VS Code builtin terminal*)

* yucky!

Mixed files and situations where I have to order by date or more complex filtering makes me hate dealing with terminals. If I want to pick and choose, let's say, the first, third, and sixth files orderd by size descending, it's unnecessarily annoying with just a terminal. I don't think that's a "power user" situation.

I admit that I am a power user, I use QTtabbar which gives me tabs in windows explorer, the same functionality is built in macOS finder. I also have keyboard shortcuts for, delete folder and move all contained files to parent folder, delete empty folders, and edit specific metadata, among other things. The single most useful "power user" shortcut that QTtabbar gives me is double click empty space to move view up to parent directory, macOS finder has a keyboard shortcut for that. Android is great for this kind of stuff too, but I have rooted my phone so no folders are hidden. I have termux set up too, the android terminal emulator, so I have grep and sed if I wanted to. I will absolutely everything I can to avoid having to do file management on iOS.

I don't know sure when the accepted definition of "power user" changed from the keyboard shortcut functions I'm describing to navigating view based on path. Knowing and navigating by path feels too basic, to me, to be a qualification for "power user".

What type of tasks do you usually do with a GUI file manager? Long time ago I've fully converted to a command line, and I don't even have any GUI file browser now (like explorer or nautilus). I find `cd`ing (with a good tab completion) faster than clicking folders, and if I navigate somewhere I probably want to execute a shell command anyway.

If I want a shell, I right click a folder location and open a terminal at location. I added the shortcut to the services menu on my macOS machine.

I move files based on size and extension and date ranges. One example would be moving 10 of the the largest video files of various formats, bigger than 150mb, created at least 2 weeks ago, that don't have digits in the name to my secondary hard drive. I am so much faster Ctrl/Command + click/drag instead of command line, especially when I don't know the exact names. In this case imagine the name format is YYYYMMDD[project][camera][resolution][description].[codec], which feels like a nightmare to manage with a terminal.

Windows explorer is set up with custom shortcuts for things like move all files to parent directory and delete folder, delete empty folders in directory, modify created date/other metadata to name some frequent operations. I use QTtabbar on windows for those. It also gives me the double click to move to parent directory shortcut, macOS has a keyboard shortcut for that built-in. Another valuable thing to me is the open with context menu that shows up. I know I can set up ailiases, but I have so many programs that I feel like it would be too many to remember. Tab completion doesn't work efficiently when tens to hundreds of files have the same prefix, for example dates when I'm working on a specific project.

I know I am a power user, but that's also why I feel comfortable asserting gui is better. I even have some nice macros setup using autohotkey for repetitive rename + sorting. Path strings are so useful for file redirecting and management with regex.

Maybe you didn't understand my comment.

I was talking about dealing in path strings which most ordinary people are not normally exposed to. And in that situation Apple provides an easy and obvious method to navigate to it.

And would be very much disagree that everything is slower with a Terminal. In fact most things I do can't even done in the Finder UI.

In the context of Dropbox users, I expect the large majority to deal with things like path strings. The entire point of Dropbox was to create a user managed cloud service. Apple has a frustrating habit of shifting the goal post on what a "power user" is. Path strings are literally the same as urls. There's "path" strings on the Dropbox webpage as part of the header when looking at the location of folders, especially nested. I am not sure why you think most ordinary people aren't exposed to it.

I agree with you that the Terminal is faster for some things. But let's take an example of moving the last 10 largest files that I downloaded a week ago, but excluding any .mov files or files larger than 2gb. That's not a "power user" operation. With finder, that's 10 mouse clicks in detailed view. Regardless of how skilled you are with a terminal, it will be slower and more inefficient to do the same thing. For the most frequent file management operations, gui will always be better and faster than terminal.

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