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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

“Weird for the sake of being weird”…you know Finder existed first, right?

Not true by any stretch, though parent didn't mention any competitor

MacOS's current Finder dates from 2001. Earlier versions of "Finder" were a completely different piece of software - different code, different interface, different UI metaphor. File manager software predating it:

  Windows Explorer
  GNOME/Nautilus
  KDE/Konqueror
  X11/xfm (X File Manager)
  sundry proprietary Unix workstations

All of the above interfaces share the same interface lineage as Mac OS, lying as they all do downstream of Xerox PARC. And all have converged on the same interface principles - visible path, a button to ascend to the parent directory, etc.

Everyone who comes to Finder from anywhere else complains. Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.

MacOS's current Finder dates from 2001

Arguably it dates from NeXTSTEP so 1989.

We’re talking about the UI here, not the binary executable. Finder was extensively reworked in 2001 from the file manager in NeXT to be much closer to the original Finder, and most of the complaints here are about UI decisions taken from the original Finder, released in 1984. That predates Windows (not just Windows Explorer, which is from ten years later), Nautilus (created by Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac team to be like Finder!), and the Unix variants, even the venerable xfm, which dates from the early 1990s.

The PARC interface (by which I guess you mean the Xerox Star) had significant differences, and I think would confuse any modern computer user far worse than the Finder. The Lisa was closer to the Star but the Mac used a simplified model that just equated files to icons.

Source: I lived through this process and used all of these for actual work at some point. The Finder’s influence on GUI file management was rather like the iPhone’s influence on phone management.

> Finder was extensively reworked in 2001 from the file manager in NeXT to be much closer to the original Finder, and most of the complaints here are about UI decisions taken from the original Finder, released in 1984.

Why would they ignore all the lessons learned between 1984 and 2001?

That's the reason why most people complain about Finder today.

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