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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I agree 100%. Been using macs for 15 years now, but the windows XP explorer in particular was fundamentally objectively better than finder, and it's nuts they haven't figured it out.

One of the things I find most baffling is that in order to "go to a folder by path" (e.g. ~) you have to hit command-shift-G ? What kind of hidden witchcraft is this?

It feels like it was designed for people who cannot understand a directory structure. But even that is done poorly, because it's not particularly useful. That said, this kepter thing looks pretty bad too.

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or you click on "Go" in the menu bar.

What key combo did you want that would be less 'magical'?

A path bar anywhere in the interface?

I also want this to be able to copy a file’s path. Right now I’m not even sure how to do that aside from cmd-i to get info and then clunkily drag select the parent dir to copy. Repeat for the file name. Am I insane or is there a better way? Just use terminal? For a time I used pathfinder which had a feature to copy the full path but I ended up hating the subscription and constant feature churn.

Why not just enable the path / breadcrumb bar that shows at the bottom of the window and lets you copy a path or open a terminal via the context menu? I currently don't have a Mac in reach but I'm pretty sure the option for that is in the "view" menu.

Not a fan of Apples approach of making many functions invisible but I never understood all the complaints about Finder. I use Arch, MacOS and Windows (if I have to) and apart from having to reconfigure it slightly, I never had any particular issues with Finder. You also have to give Apple credit for their long-form manuals - which exist for most things they offer. It's pretty easy to see in threads like this one that many people apparently do not read them, though.

Context menu → hold Option; “Copy” will change to “Copy <file> as Path”. (Sometimes you can just drag and drop the file to where you want to paste, but that depends on the destination app and so isn’t consistent.)

Another option, if you already have terminal open, is to drag the file/folder from Finder into your terminal window. The path will be pasted there.

Yep. Many different options available. Seems to me most complaining about finder haven’t actually bothered to give it the benefit of the learning-curve they’ve given to other file managers. Explorer is so far behind Finder it’s ridiculous, yet people somehow think it is better? C’mon.

What are you talking about? Like I've said I've been using finder for 15 years and most of these things people are talking have absolutely no discoverability.

Like is the mac UI really supposed to be "Get frustrated, google it, and read how to do these things and special keyboard shortcuts/drag-and-drop/etc"?

To be clear I think macs are by far the superior product on the hardware front, but nobody should be discovering new UI tricks after 3 years, let alone a decade.

Surprisingly nobody suggested yet to just select file in Finder and press Option-Cmd-C to copy file path.

Whoa! Twenty-year+ Mac user, and I never knew that trick. Thank you for that.

It's not unusual for Mac users to create custom shortcuts for things like this using built-in and 3rd-party tools like Shortcuts, Automator/AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Hammerspoon, etc.

For copying the path of a file specifically, in Finder you can hold Option and then pick Edit → Copy as Pathname.

Just use the terminal. I've never found that a GUI was any good at managing files and directories. A shell and utility commands are far better.

A single letter G

A single modifier Cmd-G

Clicking is bad/slow

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