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Comment by VerifiedReports | Hacker News Reader

Amen. App-store search is an offense sham, wasting users' time and stealing from developers.

And +1 to pitiful Mail search.

But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.

Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.

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In spotlight search, you can hold down cmd to show the path of the selected file. And cmd + enter will open the containing folder in finder.

Thanks, but the point is to see the locations IN the result list, so you can eliminate hits that you know are irrelevant (like ones on backup volumes that aren't current, or whatever). Having to click on every hit, one at a time, and hold a secret hotkey is not just undiscoverable but absurdly cumbersome.

The Finder issue can be alleviated if you include the path bar in your Finder window, at least it is so before Tahoe. So you highlight a search result and the path bar shows you where it is.

Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?

I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.

My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.

Thanks, but right-clicking on every hit, one at a time, and invoking a context menu option to see where it resides would take longer than searching for, downloading, and installing a competent file-search utility like EasyFind.

Aah, don't worry, that's why they introduced system-wide text recognition in images, powered by Apple Intelligence!

Just take a screenshot of that album description, and ... sigh

I never actually thought to try such an obvious and definitely-not-ridiculous approach, and I can (happily?) confirm it works, so thanks for that. Apple are certainly leaning into Think Different with this.

I... well, you are welcome :-)

Playing around with it for ten seconds, it looks to me you might even use the Shortcuts app to

- Take interactive screenshot - Extract text from screenshot - Copy text to clipboard

and assign that to a keyboard shortcut to at least clean up this abominable workaround a bit.

That… sounds like Command-C with extra steps. Modern software…

Thanks, but having to click on every single result one at a time and peer at a path bar somewhere is far from acceptable. This prevents you from sorting results by location, and skipping hits on volumes you know to be irrelevant.

Finder has always been the weakest part of Mac OS for some reason. The one UI that Windows beat them on.

Yes, Finder has always sucked. We were promised a "ground-up rewrite" years ago... don't know what happened there.

Microsoft has degraded Explorer, though. For example, you used to be able tell which directories were empty by simply noting whether there was a + symbol next to them. Clever and time-saving.

Now, not only did MS replace the universally-understood + sign with a stupid triangle, but it now HIDES all the triangles unless you happen to roll the cursor into the left pane. WTF, WHY?

Oh, and if you select multiple files in Explorer and right-click to say "Open with..." NOPE! Microsoft inexplicably removes "open with" if you select multiple files, even files of identical type (PNGs, for example).

The opening of multiple files was fully functional 30 years ago. WTF?

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