A picture is worth a thousand permissions requests
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
I was very efficient in my Arch environment that I have tweaked gradually for over a decade so I was quite reluctant to make the move.
Trying to keep an open mind, I told myself that at least I will get the pleasure of using the amazingly intuitive and beautiful UIs that Apple have been tweaking since before I was even born!
Imagine my disappointment. Simple things are slow and annoying. Difficult things are impossible.
Something so basic as moving a file between two directories. Can you Command-X, Command-V it? No. If both folders are open in Finder tabs you can drag the file to the tab, then wait for a blinking animation to complete before you are allowed to drop it into the target folder.
I guess you should open both folders as separate windows and then drag. But that creates even more windows, and window management in Macos is just impossible to tweak, so you are forced to use Apple's weird gesture-based paradigm. It might feel productive since you make so many animations happen but switching to the window you're thinking of should - and could - take fractions of a second and feel like an extension of your mind but in this new reality it's more like choreographing a bizarre window ballet even when you get used to it.
Things could be so much better. But hey, the hardware seems pretty good.
Hehe. Skill issue.
Cmd+C puts it on the pasteboard, (doesn't matter whether you want to move it or copy it)
Cmd+Option+V moves to destination
Cmd+V copies to destination
Different shortcuts from app to app. Back when I used Mac last time it frustrated me to no end that the simple system that works everywhere on Windows and Linux:
- home / end for start / end of line
- arrow left /right to move one character at at time
- ctrl to move one word at a time
- shift combines nicely with all these in case you need to select the text you move across
while on Mac of course home and end doesn't exist (bonus point for there being two keys there that could have been home and end or page up and page down, but that even the most dyed in the wool Mac users I know cannot explain what they are for) and while I think it is rather consistent now, back then it wasn't consistent that CMD - arrow worked like home or end.
There were different shortcuts from app to app and today I have learned that even the one shortcut I thought was consistent from app tp app on Mac, CMD-X, CMD-C and CMD-V aren't consistent as Finder isn't lacking CMD-x, they have just decided to do it differently so you use CMD-shift-V instead to paste by cutting (?), breaking to consistency even of that.
It is like the (effective, not written) building regulations in my area:
Just make sure your house doesn't look similar to any other house in the area and you should be good.
And yet I have asked for a Macbook for my new laptop. After 10 years I just had to try. The last one was fantastic, only the OS was rage inducing even after 3 years.
This time however I have done my homework. I have a Mac mini, I have checked that the fn and ctrl key can now be put in their correct positions and there now exist a way to fix CMD-tab so it does the only logical and sane thing: switches between the last windows.
Still: wish me luck.
FWIW, I used Windows for a LONG time before begrudgingly having to use a Mac for my development work, as I was doing iOS development and no one else was putting up with my I-will-claim-perfectly-reasonable alternative Linux toolchain... and Mac's keyboard shortcuts are so much more consistent that when I went back to using Windows it was the one thing I seriously missed. Hell: Mac OS even has Emacs-style cursor commands available in pretty much all native controls... Linux doesn't even have that (I'm using Linux right now and am still sad it isn't like Mac, and I had also been using Linux since I was a kid).
They most certainly do.
On extended keyboards, Home and End are dedicated keys. Home scrolls to the start of the document; End scrolls to the end.
On laptops and other reduced keyboards, Fn-left arrow gets you the Home key, and Fn-right arrow gets you the End key.
I don't know when you last used Mac, but Cmd-left and Cmd-right have been consistent at least within apps that use Apple's guidelines for many years.
It's important to remember that your expectations for how these things should work are not based on some universal Platonic ideal, but rather on how Windows did things, so when Apple does them differently, that's not some objectively heinous violation, but rather a different decision based on different preferences.
Hahahahah no. Even if you use Kaliber or remap keys natively, and somehow manage to get this to work, it won’t work all the time. And if you switch between external and internal keyboards (like, when you take your laptop to a coffee shop), forget it.
Hello, shift+insert, anyone?
Many apps that I use the most support Ctrl+A to go to start of line, Ctrl+E to go to end of line. On macOS. Try it in a few apps.
Cmd+Shift+Up or Down to select.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 for the rest of the shortcut keys.
Even worse: There isn't even a clickable context menu entry for moving files instead of copying them, which further means the keyboard shortcut isn't displayed anywhere obvious either.
For each well thought-out detail Mac OS has at least one feature that just makes you scratch your head and ask yourself if this was really intentional.
Cmd+X removes the text, and puts it on the pasteboard. If you change your mind and copy something else before pasting the Cmd+X-ed text somewhere, the text is lost.
On the other hand, when you move a file, it stays in the original location right until you paste it in the new location. If you change your mind, and copy something else without pasting the first file, the file is not lost.
In my experience no Windows user able to use keyboard shortcuts for copying files has an issue with this difference.
But there is no problem. This is how the macOS file manager have always been working. If you prefer how it worked on Windows, why did you switch to macOS? When you visit a foreign country, do you go around and tell people how they do things all wrong because it's different from your home country? Isn't that entitled a bit?
> When you visit a foreign country, do you go around and tell people how they do things all wrong because it's different from your home country?
This is software, not a cultural tradition, and I claim that asking a corporation with 160k employees for a simple feature that exists everywhere else is not entitled.
Now, what should happen if you "cut" a file with Cmd+X and you paste it into Mail? The file is deleted from the original location, but still somehow attached to the email?
There's no point in monkey-patching such a feature into macOS for the sake of appeasing recent Windows converts.
It's like complaining why Pascal doesn't support braces instead of begin/end. It's a different system. Feel free to not use it.
Homework exercise: go through various macOS apps' menus and see what happens if you hold the Option key.
It’s intended to make it easier to move files and folders around without first opening a window for the destination. If you hold the dragged file over a folder a moment longer, the target folder will open in a new window where you can either drop the file or navigate more deeply by repeating the process.
To avoid this behavior, drop dragged files in the destination folders before the spring loading triggers.
I use Cmd+X Cmd+V all the time, so I'm quite confused by your issue.
But indeed Total Commander is the thing I miss the most.
After years of searching, it's the closest Mac replacement for Total Commander that I've found, it's really great.
I don't currently have a Mac, but when I did and if I did I would definitely install brew before whatever other essential - how else am I going to install the latter? (I'd reluctantly open Terminal and Safari to do so, and then to be honest Alacritty and Firefox would probably beat anything for window management. I used to have it all scripted, so it actually would've been just Terminal git clone and run.)
I am also one of those Linux desktop users who bought an M2 for power management and I don't understand how people can be satisfied with the out of the box window management experience. Every other environment supports hyper + arrow to move windows into a split view, windows, gnome, kde, whatever.
Not that I've ever stuck with one long enough. And I might have not done this at all with this latest Mac, I tried stage manager. But had gave up on that too last week.
This assumption is silly.
As explained GP used a customized Linux desktop for years. Switching from that to Mac OS' limited window management features can definitely motivate someone to google possible solutions as one of the first steps. I know because it was the same for me as well. I don't need an insane set of keyboard shortcuts but I think matching e.g. Gnome's default experience isn't too much to ask for.
The only edge case I can see is “cutting” once and then pasting to multiple destinations, which would need N-1 copies and a final move.
It does.
Add it to the long list on macOS and iOS of things Apple provides but are unintuitive and difficult/impossible to discover on your own.
I am still learning ways to make it better (thanks to all the replies) but I just don't think it's very good. Its supposed to be the best. It's neither beautiful nor intuitive (subjectively), but what really bothers me is that it's not an effective tool.
Who is it designed for? Beginners obviously find a lot of simple things difficult. My colleagues should be power users since they are developers using it for decades, but when we screenshare there's a big difference in efficiency - the most obvious one is all the time they spend on finding, moving, resizing, and reorganizing windows but there are so many other little things that add up as well.
Good luck.
try Command-C, Command-Option-V. works for me :)
also, if you're in need of a launcher, Raycast is nice. i don't use any of their fancy AI stuff and opted out of data tracking. i have several window management functions there that are indispensable.
“I see you’ve clicked the documents folder via this apps open dialog. Do you want to give it permission to access that folder that you just clicked on to access” infuriating.
What’s so annoying is that these constant alerts make the system potentially less secure as you get notification blindness. Same with how often iOS pops up the password dialog, you get so used to entering your password that it takes conscious effort to not do it by default an actually make sure it’s a legit password box and not a phish.
I think of all these app permissions (I have similar thoughts looking at iphone settings) as being some sort of Marie Kondo epiphany - I don't need a better UI - I need less stuff.
I prefer to maintain the security issues and look for a UX solution.
I'd say this is a bit disingenuous.
It's frustrating to see people complaining, but not offering any ideas for improvement, just 'this sucks, fix it'.
If someone installed apps with kernel extensions, disabling enhanced security on the hardware, then Id argue they should be competent enough to understand the issue, so the article is a bit disingenuous on that front.
Additionally, things like Apple ID for iCloud login require re-logging with 2 factor, again because the hardware has updated.
So there’s probably a cleaner UI model here that could run the user through all of these side cases, but it’s not as simply as copying app permissions (all of the unix level file permissions remain intact already)