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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

I took a shirt-term job a few years back and tried giving Windows a go after many many years absence.

Never again. Wow. It’s stagnated in many respects and its leading innovations are, sadly, hostile to users. I was very surprised.

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> It’s stagnated in many respects

You can’t say that with a straight face when the Finder on Mac has seen absolutely zero change since 2008. Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

I’m an Apple user and honestly I don’t remember the last useful feature added other the Universal Clipboard. I asked ChatGPT for a rundown and I just see a list of “moved things around and refreshed the UI”

> Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

KDE's Dolphin File manager can: 1) Split the file window in two with a simple button press. 2) Pressing F4 opens an embedded terminal in the current directory. 3) Provides a super easy way of adding network drives, and a whole view to save them to. 4) Tags for organising files / folders. 5) Pressing space puts it into a super simple "Selection Mode".

There are more alternative file managers out there than just Mac's Finder. I don't think I have ever experienced Windows "blowing me out of the water" with it's file management controls.

Windows could (can?) read all the metadata out of MP3s and photos and edit it, use it as columns and virtual groups/folders (IIRC). Most file managers I know are limited to filenames and a couple of dates attached (tags are too easy to implement, they’re manual, I’m not impressed)

Coming from Vista, Tiger’s Finder was a joke and it still is to this day (with the obvious exception of QuickLook, which is great)

I don’t know anything about Linux, I just wanted to point out that macOS hasn’t seen much improvement in the past decade other than continuous shuffling and redesigns.

It's a shame because I remember Konqueror as a file manager being really great under KDE 3.5 (oh the nostalgia) and Dolphin seemed useless by comparison.

> I asked ChatGPT for a rundown and I just see a list of “moved things around and refreshed the UI”

Why would you even admit that? Embarrassing.

Lol

> Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

Please elaborate.

This is a file manager, but it acts as a Media Library. See how it can show the music’s metadata in the columns. You can edit all of the metadata, even in batch.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/7iF2D.png

Here you can find a few examples of its features. Skip the sorting and look at the grouping, custom metadata filtering, etc. not to mention the advanced search with any of this metadata.

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/transform-windows-explorer-f...

It has a field for “word count” (!!!) while in Finder I’m lucky if it remembers that I want my files to NOT appear overlapped on the desktop.

Custom File Properties aren't new in Vista - they date back to the Windows 95 Shell API. The only thing Vista added was the ability to filter and group directly from the list-view column headers (in Windows XP you could group-by, but with limited options, and no in-place filtering).

I think XP's File Explorer was the best. Keyboard shortcuts that actually do things useful: keypad * will expand all directories under the current one if you select the item in the tree on the left. A great way to make your hard-disk using friends sit for a while - select C:\ and press * on the numeric keypad...

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