been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI
Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.
> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory
Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.
How can it be called FINDER, if it can't FIND things? cmd+shift+g should be a fuzzy search, but it returns nothing 80% of the time. cmd+f often can't see files that are in first level folders inside my home folder.
Meanwhile, hitting Esc+C in the terminal (via fzf) it's totally effective.
Just add it to the sidebar. Finder > Settings > Sidebar > Locations. Or drag it into Favorites.
> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder
View > Show Path Bar. You can also right click on the directory name at the top of the window and it’ll give you the same options.
I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.
[GNOME enters the chat]: "That's nothing, I'm way worse!"
However in my personal opinion Nautilus’s breadcrumb picker does edge it against Finder.
So I stand by my comment that Finder is the worst.
That used to be a preference, and last I used it, it was not. It is forced on because that’s how the GNOME developers thought you should use it… “Our way or the highway!” — GNOME devs.
Finder wins based on that alone. Finder wins so completely because of that one single thing that I’ll never voluntarily use GNOME again.
Finder is genuinely horrible. It’s obvious no one at Apple cares about files anymore nor anyone working with them.
We’re all supposed to consume cloud these days or so it seems.
With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.
Why on Earth is this a requirement? When you're navigating through Finder using keyboard, it's very inconvenient to use two keypresses to perform a very basic operation. Using Enter to open a file is how every file manager on every operating system works except Finder. Why would Enter key be hardcoded to a file rename operation instead?
It is a typical Apple behaviour of doing things differently from the rest of the world just for the sake of it, even when it's detrimental to the user experience.
Actually I just checked and it's not, technically you can create key equivalents without modifiers as well [1]. For Finder this doesn't work though, because enter seems to be specifically handled before menu-level key equivalent processing. (Note that it's not guaranteed to work on other apps either, based on [2] seems key equivalents are only dispatched if modifier keys exists. But that might be out of date since it worked for the people in the SE post.)
Option+Enter is the next closest thing.
I agree that their implementation here is not good. In fact there's already a "Rename" menu item, which isn't actually wired to the enter hotkey (this is very un mac like because it means there is no easy way to discover it). The "rename" menu item is actually a fairly recent addition to mac (I think maybe 10.11) while Finder itself is ancient (it was one of the last few apps to be migrated to Cocoa and even today still has lots of legacy warts), and possibly no one bothered cleaning things up.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132984/keyboard-sh...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...