As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn.
Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system
I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol
When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe had terrible Finder is. This is software from the "design" company.
One of the biggest pitfalls I ran into at the time (and remember from the top of my head) was that when you copy a folder, and a folder with the same name already exists at the destination, it will quietly replace it, rather than giving me a dialog asking if I want to Replace or Merge.
Oh, that I can't switch on/off show hidden files, I have to run some command line command to do that...
This was my instant reaction when I started using a Mac. But 15 years later, even knowing more tricks for interacting with it, it still baffles me. Once you've used Windows Explorer and a few Linux distro navigators, there's no denying that Finder is unquestionably worst in class.
Change to `false` to reverse it. You have to `killall Finder` or force quit it for each to take effect.
Also, Shift-Command-. (dot) in Finder. You can find a lot of useful settings that can be adjusted to your preferred mode digging through this repo (not affiliated): https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles
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.
I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
And yet copying multiple large files from or to the same disk grinds the throughput to a halt on Windows where Finder keeps up close to theoretical bandwidth in sum.
What do you mean by "see the file system?" It's not exactly hard to enable in Finder. In Finder's settings, one can have the root directory, home directory, etc. enabled in the sidebar. Not to mention, one can easily drag & drop common folders into the sidebar too.
Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.
So I’m in Microsoft Word. I hit the open file button and get the finder chooser window thing. I want to go up one level.
How??
I’m sure there’s some magical key combination to do it but I can never remember it.
That’s the first thing I can think off atop my head.
I’ve never played in Finder settings. Do I have to do that to get something useable? I didn’t even know it had settings it doesn’t seem like the sort of app that should.
Imo tech companies want people to be as tech-illiterate as possible. Tech illiterate people will not realise how the tech company did extra work to make their product less capable and less empowering to the user in favour of being more beneficial and empowering to the tech company itself.
Obfuscating the file system has been a popular move in this regard. A file system is so elegant and empowering and useful for so many tasks, of course they want to hide it.
Yes one of the first things I did when moving to mac was pinning Macintosh HDD root folder to Finder, but that kept going away every time I restarted my Max so I bought Bloom which is way better
Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get
I understand your point, but "Finder" does make it harder to organize things. When you save, they hide away folder browser by default, make it really difficult to navigate to different folders, and push for a "just hit save and search for it later!" mentality.
I agree you can overcome this, but you find yourself fighting against macOS a bit to do it.
(Also, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this isn't a blog post... it's an ad. So of course the issues are exaggerated a bit. The ironic part is I don't think the app actually solves the problems mentioned.)
I don't know where you get "really difficult" and "fighting against macOS" from. You only have to hit the disclosure arrow next to "Where" in the save dialog one time and it remembers it and shows it by default from then on. (Okay, maybe it's once per app? I don't remember for sure, but I can't remember the last time the save panel didn't show me the folder browser by default.)
If you read the article, it talks from the perspective of "I help lots of friends and family with IT stuff". For most users, they wouldn't know how to get to the larger menu or that Cmd+Shft+G lets them type in a path.
So true, so true. Every time I think I've got my structure set up properly, I then do something in haste, and can't find it later. Power user and file manager are two totally different things.
He’s complaining…because he sells a solution to this problem. I hated Finder when I switched to Mac back in 2007. So much so I bought PathFinder. One thing that pissed me off and still does, is when I copy over a folder with the same name, it doesn’t merge the contents, it deletes everything in the existing folder. That’s not what I expected as a Windows user and it still seems like the wrong behavior almost 20 years later. I no longer use PathFinder, it had its own problems and bugs…but in general I find Finder pretty lacking.
If you copy-paste a folder using the keyboard, a dialog pops up asking you whether to merge the contents. Totally inconsistent with drag-and—drop, but useful to know.
Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.
The deciders for me, in case you're interested:
- Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.
- Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.
- Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.
I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)
I’d like to propose a rule that all the Finder bashers in this thread accompany their complaint with at least one concrete example.
I’m no Apple fanboy, but blind hate is just as bad as blind love, and so far 100% of the specifics brought up have turned out to be people who just don’t have a basic familiarity with the software. I genuinely don’t begrudge a person sticking to what they know, but it’s a point towards what’s good for you and maybe whether it’s intuitive, not towards whether Finder is objectively good or lacks features. I’d be happy to read both real issues and people learning more about Finder, but just “Finder sucks” doesn’t help anybody.
Finder is indeed frustrating. "Recent" seems like an attempt to fix this without the need to use some giant camera roll?
The (hard) problem is that almost every finder alternative/add-on I've tried is someone else's ideal workflow that still doesn't sit well with me. I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons.
Both work marginally better (for me) when used in concert with the quick-find tools like Alfred (or Spotlight) and KRunner. None of these are perfect.
Showerthought: maybe the "find files" interfaces aren't the worst offenders; maybe it's the "place files" workflows that are problematic and we're trying to solve the wrong problem?
If only recent actually worked. I see no rhyme or reason why something gets in recent. I guess finder has to be involved. So often I am working with files between apps, saving and opening and such and the files never appear in recent which defeats the purpose for me.
And then we have the spotlight deamon processes which seem to exist only to burn earth's precious resources.
Wow. I'm a Linux user and I have to use Mac for some work related tasks. I genuinely hate Finder and was going to lean back and enjoy reading this article.
This went into a direction I didn't expect at all.
Yeah, as someone whose favorite file manager is Dolphin, I have the opposite preferences of the author of the marketing post. I feel like Finder is overly-simplified and tries to abstract the directory structure away from the user too much.
In the end, it turns out for me that the classic explorer Tree View is the most intuitive. I know where things are as a sub-tree system. I get that hard links etc. complicate this and perhaps there are smart folders etc which do not fit this model well but I find I frequently want to “Go Up” in the hierarchy and this requires an uncomfortable shortcut on a Macbook (arrow key) or a menu button rather than a toolbar icon.
But these are complaints. The right answer is to see if I can build a file explorer for MacOS that behaves in the fashion I desire.
Apple has repeatedly over the years attempted to create interfaces where knowing where the actual data was saved was no necessary to using and finding that data. iTunes, iPhoto, most of iOS.
It’s usually met with a lot of resistance from people who have carefully and painstakingly crafted their perfect file hierarchies and hate it when Apple messes with that.
Some of the content recognition stuff in this seem pretty interesting, but I’m not sure that “everything in a single folder with preview thumbnails turned on” would be less “frustrating” for me than the current finder paradigm. This seems like it’s aiming for the iOS photos interface but for all of your files. In general I find searching for one specific photo in that interface to be more frustrating than knowing a hierarchy it would have been saved under. But for finding recent photos and finding a cluster of temporally related photos it is better. Is that a paradigm that works for all files too? For recents probably, but I’m not sure I often look for temporally related files. Still, this is a neat looking program/project, and like I said the content recognition stuff does seem interesting.
Time is merely the default order. You can also sort by what the document says. The amount. The date printed on it. Who it's from. So a receipt search isn't "when did I save this" it is "the $1200 one from March." That's what makes it work beyond photos, where all you have is time and place.
I've had to use Finder, and it's definitely frustrating in a "Think Different" sort of way, but this article doesn't actually mention why beyond vague statements.
I can make the apologetics for just about anything in macOS. After over 20 years of using OS X/macOS, I still can't make the case for this one. Imagine a button has focus, you hit Enter, and it allows you to change the text on the button instead of executing the code behind button.click(). That behavior is just as dumb if a file has focus in Finder.
Because, as one of the original GUIs, when they conceived of how the Macintosh worked, you used the command keys to perform actions on files, and you could rename the file just by typing. Cmd-O was the shortcut for opening files, which makes sense for obvious reasons.
When they released the Macintosh to the world, Andy Hertzfeld realized that people were renaming items in the Finder by accident; so he added the "return" key (already used to confirm actions) as an "arming" step[1].
Now, one might ask: wouldn't that interrupt people navigating via the keyboard? No, because the original Macintosh didn't have arrow keys on the keyboard. This was an intentional choice—or, perhaps, mandate from Jobs—as a way to get users to use the mouse as their primary input device, and to force developers to create mouse-driven interfaces. With no arrow keys, no typeahead search implemented, and a clean slate for designing an interface, I'm guessing using Return to open a file wasn't a strong consideration at the time.
Why wasn't it changed? Because Mac OS X was made for Mac users, and we all have muscle memory dating back decades :P
Aside from “it’s historically always done that”, I’d argue that because you use arrow keys to navigate around the finder (left, right, up, down to select, CMD-up to go up a directory, it only makes sense that CMD-down would open a directory (or file/application). And within that context it makes more sense than “enter”.
It's my app, no veil intended. It pulls all the drives, folders into one stream . So it doesn't matter where a file is located. Then it reads what is inside so you can type in what you remember.
My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing software is ridiculous. And, yes, Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.
I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.
It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.
You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!
I do most of my work in the terminal, so the Finder is less of an issue than it would be otherwise. I like for the desktop environment to be nice, but I don't necessarily need it for much more than managing the browser and terminal windows most of the time. But, the weird layout of the filesystem and more limited terminal environment on macOS is also uncomfortable. In some cases, it's merely different rather than worse, but the overall experience for me is notably less comfortable than Linux.
same. now that there are finally good linux laptops with good battery and haptic touchpads i'm having a bit of buyers remorse, and will probably pick one up soon.
> Computer folders are still organized in structures set up some 50 years ago. Operating systems change. Computers change. Search changes. But this has never changed. I can't change that.
And we've been using the Dewey Decimal System for like 150 years. Both are good systems. Kepter (a visual/gallery system) would break down when looking at more than a dozen files (or when files are very similar). I don't really think it's a good idea.
What we desperately need is a system-wide (or at least documents-wide) semantic/vector search, which is basically a weekend project and a $4.99 one-time purchase.
I agree! I've been building this alternative file browser called 'Overlap' which uses Mac's tagging system. Mainly for images. It suggests tags based on Apple's photo classifier & similarity to your own tags. You can also explore data using a visual Venn Diagram.
https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/Overlap
By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.
The problem with Finder is historic. The classic Mac finder was a work of art, if you are the sort of person that arranges things spatially, but most programmers are not. Hence NeXT created something else which got merged back incoherently into what became OSX.
The Risc OS filer remains king, largely because managing windows on Risc OS is much more tolerable.
Finder is one of the reasons I quit Mac. Main reason was that I had a knack for crashing it. And really not a fan of their marketing department not being completely in sync with their engineering department. Great marketing! But spent like five grand on a desktop Tower Mac and final cut Pro could not use all the cores. This was probably about 10-15 years ago.
This looks cool, but my least favorite things about Finder are not actually related to finding things. I prefer column mode, but:
1. When I right click, I can't create a new file of any kind. I can create a new folder—sometimes (see the next point).
2. If the folder is full, it's virtually impossible to right-click an empty spot to create a new folder. You have to scroll all the way to the top/bottom and right click the very narrow spot between the folder and the header/footer.
I think you're gonna lose a lot of comments here to the "Finder" word here. The problem is not the Finder but directories, which exist on all operating systems.
With that aside, this is a great idea for most files. Of course my images are still in folders with the projects they belong to, but my life photos are in one stream. Files, contacts, a lot of data would benefit greatly from this visualization.
As for people with 1000 files on their desktop, who cares, they are as good as hoarders and they get what it comes to them. Discipline helps both in the real and in the digital world.
If you have the time to be focused on folder hierarchy and organization, great. Most of the people I help don't, and I built this for them. In building it, I learned that organizing files wastes much more time than you think. Finding files is all anyone actually needs.
Surprised by the rest of the comments because I genuinely like Finder more than any other file manager I've used. I run it in column mode all the time. Space-to-QuickLook is also amazing.
This submission appears to be a self-promotional advertisement by the developer, who created a HN account literally an hour ago.
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair, and I should have posted it as a Show HN. It's my app and my essay, and I said so in the thread as soon as it came up. New account because I've read here for years without commenting. Happy for a mod to relabel it.
Finder is fucking dire. I spend more time on the terminal.
The vertical column mode is useless as file names are always too long. It forces you to drag and drop and open loads of windows rather than cut and paste via menus. Open vs rename is fucked up. Half the machine is hidden initially. Hiding file extensions is just broken. Every view seems to forget what state it’s in. The file copying and continue copying thing fucks up network drives. cp is actually an order of magnitude faster. The icons at the top are shit. All the keyboard shortcuts require mutant hands that only emacs users have. The trash can semantics of “put back” are just crap. It crashes at least once a day for me. I could go on for days.
Coming from Windows, what's outrageous about Finder, is that when I'm looking at a SMB share has is named the same as a local directory, it is very confusing as to which location is which. Scary. Like, show the full path! Not "Folder" at the top. Just crazy.
unpopular opinion apparently, but i don‘t understand the finder hate. as a real-life, non-software-developer user, i couldn‘t care less about library folders, root folders, or a unix-tradition file system at all. i want my folders with my documents, pictures, etc. to me that‘s far more user-friendly and comprehensible than what explorer exposes to normal people.
I find this entire rant to be utterly ridiculous. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I do not think there is anything wrong with Finder. It's honestly no worse than any other file manager that I have used. I much prefer Finder to any alternative I have tried.
I really enjoy the various keyboard shortcuts [1]. I honestly wish more file managers had some of these features. I probably use "shift+command+g" the most. It's so nice being able to jump through Finder like changing directories in the terminal.
Honestly, for more complex tasks, I actually just use the terminal anyway.
As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn.
Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system
I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol
When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe had terrible Finder is. This is software from the "design" company.
One of the biggest pitfalls I ran into at the time (and remember from the top of my head) was that when you copy a folder, and a folder with the same name already exists at the destination, it will quietly replace it, rather than giving me a dialog asking if I want to Replace or Merge.
Oh, that I can't switch on/off show hidden files, I have to run some command line command to do that...
This was my instant reaction when I started using a Mac. But 15 years later, even knowing more tricks for interacting with it, it still baffles me. Once you've used Windows Explorer and a few Linux distro navigators, there's no denying that Finder is unquestionably worst in class.
This may be of use:
> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
Change to `false` to reverse it. You have to `killall Finder` or force quit it for each to take effect.
Also, Shift-Command-. (dot) in Finder. You can find a lot of useful settings that can be adjusted to your preferred mode digging through this repo (not affiliated): https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles
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.
or you click on "Go" in the menu bar.
What key combo did you want that would be less 'magical'?
I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
Explorer is a much better tool than Finder. Couldn't agree more.
And yet copying multiple large files from or to the same disk grinds the throughput to a halt on Windows where Finder keeps up close to theoretical bandwidth in sum.
What do you mean by "see the file system?" It's not exactly hard to enable in Finder. In Finder's settings, one can have the root directory, home directory, etc. enabled in the sidebar. Not to mention, one can easily drag & drop common folders into the sidebar too.
Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.
So I’m in Microsoft Word. I hit the open file button and get the finder chooser window thing. I want to go up one level.
How??
I’m sure there’s some magical key combination to do it but I can never remember it.
That’s the first thing I can think off atop my head.
I’ve never played in Finder settings. Do I have to do that to get something useable? I didn’t even know it had settings it doesn’t seem like the sort of app that should.
Command + Uparrow.
In the Finder, look at the 'Go' menu, all those keyboard shortcuts works everywhere the file open/save window is displayed.
Like Command+Shift+D for Desktop, Command+Shift+O for Documents.
Click on the drop down at the top of the Open window (where the name of the current folder is displayed) and you get the whole path to choose from.
Thank you!!
You right click on the folder name at the top of the window, this gives you the tree path from 'root'
Not the person you're replying to, but I assume they're referring to the ability to see something like:
``` src ├── app │ └── page.tsx └── components └── header.tsx ```
EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.
I can see that easily in Finder. List View or Column View displays files like that.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchldaafb302/...
Imo tech companies want people to be as tech-illiterate as possible. Tech illiterate people will not realise how the tech company did extra work to make their product less capable and less empowering to the user in favour of being more beneficial and empowering to the tech company itself.
Obfuscating the file system has been a popular move in this regard. A file system is so elegant and empowering and useful for so many tasks, of course they want to hide it.
Yes one of the first things I did when moving to mac was pinning Macintosh HDD root folder to Finder, but that kept going away every time I restarted my Max so I bought Bloom which is way better
this
Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get
I understand your point, but "Finder" does make it harder to organize things. When you save, they hide away folder browser by default, make it really difficult to navigate to different folders, and push for a "just hit save and search for it later!" mentality.
I agree you can overcome this, but you find yourself fighting against macOS a bit to do it.
(Also, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this isn't a blog post... it's an ad. So of course the issues are exaggerated a bit. The ironic part is I don't think the app actually solves the problems mentioned.)
I don't know where you get "really difficult" and "fighting against macOS" from. You only have to hit the disclosure arrow next to "Where" in the save dialog one time and it remembers it and shows it by default from then on. (Okay, maybe it's once per app? I don't remember for sure, but I can't remember the last time the save panel didn't show me the folder browser by default.)
If you read the article, it talks from the perspective of "I help lots of friends and family with IT stuff". For most users, they wouldn't know how to get to the larger menu or that Cmd+Shft+G lets them type in a path.
So true, so true. Every time I think I've got my structure set up properly, I then do something in haste, and can't find it later. Power user and file manager are two totally different things.
He’s complaining…because he sells a solution to this problem. I hated Finder when I switched to Mac back in 2007. So much so I bought PathFinder. One thing that pissed me off and still does, is when I copy over a folder with the same name, it doesn’t merge the contents, it deletes everything in the existing folder. That’s not what I expected as a Windows user and it still seems like the wrong behavior almost 20 years later. I no longer use PathFinder, it had its own problems and bugs…but in general I find Finder pretty lacking.
If you do option while moving the file it merges both directories but even I didn't know this until I googled it.
If you copy-paste a folder using the keyboard, a dialog pops up asking you whether to merge the contents. Totally inconsistent with drag-and—drop, but useful to know.
Finder is terrible. Not sure why it's worth defending to the point of attacking someone who simpy made something which fills its gaps.
Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.
The deciders for me, in case you're interested:
- Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.
- Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.
- Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.
I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)
I’d like to propose a rule that all the Finder bashers in this thread accompany their complaint with at least one concrete example.
I’m no Apple fanboy, but blind hate is just as bad as blind love, and so far 100% of the specifics brought up have turned out to be people who just don’t have a basic familiarity with the software. I genuinely don’t begrudge a person sticking to what they know, but it’s a point towards what’s good for you and maybe whether it’s intuitive, not towards whether Finder is objectively good or lacks features. I’d be happy to read both real issues and people learning more about Finder, but just “Finder sucks” doesn’t help anybody.
I expected people here to recommend several dual-pane file manager (aka orthodox file manager) as a replacement for Finder.
But I see not a single comment recommending one? No good UI ones on macOS?
Finder is indeed frustrating. "Recent" seems like an attempt to fix this without the need to use some giant camera roll?
The (hard) problem is that almost every finder alternative/add-on I've tried is someone else's ideal workflow that still doesn't sit well with me. I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons.
Both work marginally better (for me) when used in concert with the quick-find tools like Alfred (or Spotlight) and KRunner. None of these are perfect.
Showerthought: maybe the "find files" interfaces aren't the worst offenders; maybe it's the "place files" workflows that are problematic and we're trying to solve the wrong problem?
If only recent actually worked. I see no rhyme or reason why something gets in recent. I guess finder has to be involved. So often I am working with files between apps, saving and opening and such and the files never appear in recent which defeats the purpose for me.
And then we have the spotlight deamon processes which seem to exist only to burn earth's precious resources.
But when it works it works great. ymmv
Wow. I'm a Linux user and I have to use Mac for some work related tasks. I genuinely hate Finder and was going to lean back and enjoy reading this article.
This went into a direction I didn't expect at all.
Yeah, as someone whose favorite file manager is Dolphin, I have the opposite preferences of the author of the marketing post. I feel like Finder is overly-simplified and tries to abstract the directory structure away from the user too much.
In the end, it turns out for me that the classic explorer Tree View is the most intuitive. I know where things are as a sub-tree system. I get that hard links etc. complicate this and perhaps there are smart folders etc which do not fit this model well but I find I frequently want to “Go Up” in the hierarchy and this requires an uncomfortable shortcut on a Macbook (arrow key) or a menu button rather than a toolbar icon.
But these are complaints. The right answer is to see if I can build a file explorer for MacOS that behaves in the fashion I desire.
Apple has repeatedly over the years attempted to create interfaces where knowing where the actual data was saved was no necessary to using and finding that data. iTunes, iPhoto, most of iOS.
It’s usually met with a lot of resistance from people who have carefully and painstakingly crafted their perfect file hierarchies and hate it when Apple messes with that.
Some of the content recognition stuff in this seem pretty interesting, but I’m not sure that “everything in a single folder with preview thumbnails turned on” would be less “frustrating” for me than the current finder paradigm. This seems like it’s aiming for the iOS photos interface but for all of your files. In general I find searching for one specific photo in that interface to be more frustrating than knowing a hierarchy it would have been saved under. But for finding recent photos and finding a cluster of temporally related photos it is better. Is that a paradigm that works for all files too? For recents probably, but I’m not sure I often look for temporally related files. Still, this is a neat looking program/project, and like I said the content recognition stuff does seem interesting.
Time is merely the default order. You can also sort by what the document says. The amount. The date printed on it. Who it's from. So a receipt search isn't "when did I save this" it is "the $1200 one from March." That's what makes it work beyond photos, where all you have is time and place.
Thinly veiled marketing post.
I've had to use Finder, and it's definitely frustrating in a "Think Different" sort of way, but this article doesn't actually mention why beyond vague statements.
Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode.
Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode.
I can make the apologetics for just about anything in macOS. After over 20 years of using OS X/macOS, I still can't make the case for this one. Imagine a button has focus, you hit Enter, and it allows you to change the text on the button instead of executing the code behind button.click(). That behavior is just as dumb if a file has focus in Finder.
Because, as one of the original GUIs, when they conceived of how the Macintosh worked, you used the command keys to perform actions on files, and you could rename the file just by typing. Cmd-O was the shortcut for opening files, which makes sense for obvious reasons.
When they released the Macintosh to the world, Andy Hertzfeld realized that people were renaming items in the Finder by accident; so he added the "return" key (already used to confirm actions) as an "arming" step[1].
Now, one might ask: wouldn't that interrupt people navigating via the keyboard? No, because the original Macintosh didn't have arrow keys on the keyboard. This was an intentional choice—or, perhaps, mandate from Jobs—as a way to get users to use the mouse as their primary input device, and to force developers to create mouse-driven interfaces. With no arrow keys, no typeahead search implemented, and a clean slate for designing an interface, I'm guessing using Return to open a file wasn't a strong consideration at the time.
Why wasn't it changed? Because Mac OS X was made for Mac users, and we all have muscle memory dating back decades :P
[1]: https://www.folklore.org/A_Floppy_named_lsadkfjalhkjh.html
Aside from “it’s historically always done that”, I’d argue that because you use arrow keys to navigate around the finder (left, right, up, down to select, CMD-up to go up a directory, it only makes sense that CMD-down would open a directory (or file/application). And within that context it makes more sense than “enter”.
It's my app, no veil intended. It pulls all the drives, folders into one stream . So it doesn't matter where a file is located. Then it reads what is inside so you can type in what you remember.
My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing software is ridiculous. And, yes, Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.
I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.
It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.
“Weird for the sake of being weird”…you know Finder existed first, right?
You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!
Maybe because you can open a terminal, do port install mc and then ignore the Finder most of the time :)
I do most of my work in the terminal, so the Finder is less of an issue than it would be otherwise. I like for the desktop environment to be nice, but I don't necessarily need it for much more than managing the browser and terminal windows most of the time. But, the weird layout of the filesystem and more limited terminal environment on macOS is also uncomfortable. In some cases, it's merely different rather than worse, but the overall experience for me is notably less comfortable than Linux.
same. now that there are finally good linux laptops with good battery and haptic touchpads i'm having a bit of buyers remorse, and will probably pick one up soon.
such a waste of damn good hardware though
Who currently makes a decent haptic trackpad? I have an Asus with gorgeous OLED screen, good battery life etc and fucking GARBAGE trackpad.
I see no reference to using Finder in 1990, and original flaws.
At this point, I've come to live with it. I do use Supercharge[1] to fix some of the warts.
[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge
> Computer folders are still organized in structures set up some 50 years ago. Operating systems change. Computers change. Search changes. But this has never changed. I can't change that.
And we've been using the Dewey Decimal System for like 150 years. Both are good systems. Kepter (a visual/gallery system) would break down when looking at more than a dozen files (or when files are very similar). I don't really think it's a good idea.
What we desperately need is a system-wide (or at least documents-wide) semantic/vector search, which is basically a weekend project and a $4.99 one-time purchase.
I agree! I've been building this alternative file browser called 'Overlap' which uses Mac's tagging system. Mainly for images. It suggests tags based on Apple's photo classifier & similarity to your own tags. You can also explore data using a visual Venn Diagram. https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/Overlap
By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.
The problem with Finder is historic. The classic Mac finder was a work of art, if you are the sort of person that arranges things spatially, but most programmers are not. Hence NeXT created something else which got merged back incoherently into what became OSX.
The Risc OS filer remains king, largely because managing windows on Risc OS is much more tolerable.
You didn't read past the title.
You don’t understand words?
Finder is one of the reasons I quit Mac. Main reason was that I had a knack for crashing it. And really not a fan of their marketing department not being completely in sync with their engineering department. Great marketing! But spent like five grand on a desktop Tower Mac and final cut Pro could not use all the cores. This was probably about 10-15 years ago.
This looks cool, but my least favorite things about Finder are not actually related to finding things. I prefer column mode, but:
1. When I right click, I can't create a new file of any kind. I can create a new folder—sometimes (see the next point).
2. If the folder is full, it's virtually impossible to right-click an empty spot to create a new folder. You have to scroll all the way to the top/bottom and right click the very narrow spot between the folder and the header/footer.
Regarding 2, use the File menu in the menubar.
I think you're gonna lose a lot of comments here to the "Finder" word here. The problem is not the Finder but directories, which exist on all operating systems.
With that aside, this is a great idea for most files. Of course my images are still in folders with the projects they belong to, but my life photos are in one stream. Files, contacts, a lot of data would benefit greatly from this visualization.
As for people with 1000 files on their desktop, who cares, they are as good as hoarders and they get what it comes to them. Discipline helps both in the real and in the digital world.
If you have the time to be focused on folder hierarchy and organization, great. Most of the people I help don't, and I built this for them. In building it, I learned that organizing files wastes much more time than you think. Finding files is all anyone actually needs.
Also Spotlight worked decently until a few years ago, but not anymore
Does anyone else experience this? Like it freezes when searching for programs?
So it's like fancy "last used" in finder?
Surprised by the rest of the comments because I genuinely like Finder more than any other file manager I've used. I run it in column mode all the time. Space-to-QuickLook is also amazing.
This submission appears to be a self-promotional advertisement by the developer, who created a HN account literally an hour ago.
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anything, this should be a Show HN.
Fair, and I should have posted it as a Show HN. It's my app and my essay, and I said so in the thread as soon as it came up. New account because I've read here for years without commenting. Happy for a mod to relabel it.
How do I fix search on OSX? I can never find anything, even when I do the name contains search.
It's so bad for me that I often drop down into Terminal, find there (with 'find') and then use 'open'. I'm very used to doing this.
I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.
Finder is fucking dire. I spend more time on the terminal.
The vertical column mode is useless as file names are always too long. It forces you to drag and drop and open loads of windows rather than cut and paste via menus. Open vs rename is fucked up. Half the machine is hidden initially. Hiding file extensions is just broken. Every view seems to forget what state it’s in. The file copying and continue copying thing fucks up network drives. cp is actually an order of magnitude faster. The icons at the top are shit. All the keyboard shortcuts require mutant hands that only emacs users have. The trash can semantics of “put back” are just crap. It crashes at least once a day for me. I could go on for days.
Windows 10 is notably better.
and dont even get me started on the missing backspace key..
HN hug of death.
Totally. Netlify bugged out for a few.
Coming from Windows, what's outrageous about Finder, is that when I'm looking at a SMB share has is named the same as a local directory, it is very confusing as to which location is which. Scary. Like, show the full path! Not "Folder" at the top. Just crazy.
Recently switched to Mac and I always have this question mark like how can this be so bad after decades and why is everyone cool with it
unpopular opinion apparently, but i don‘t understand the finder hate. as a real-life, non-software-developer user, i couldn‘t care less about library folders, root folders, or a unix-tradition file system at all. i want my folders with my documents, pictures, etc. to me that‘s far more user-friendly and comprehensible than what explorer exposes to normal people.
Finder is really limited in many ways but it's one of the only FM that supports Miller columns, which I use quite a bit.
I’m now a full Mac user (personal + work), that came from Windows. Hate to say it, but Windows Explorer is better than Finder
I find this entire rant to be utterly ridiculous. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I do not think there is anything wrong with Finder. It's honestly no worse than any other file manager that I have used. I much prefer Finder to any alternative I have tried.
I really enjoy the various keyboard shortcuts [1]. I honestly wish more file managers had some of these features. I probably use "shift+command+g" the most. It's so nice being able to jump through Finder like changing directories in the terminal.
Honestly, for more complex tasks, I actually just use the terminal anyway.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
Water is wet.
Finder is by far the worst file manager ever created.
You didn't read past the title.
Except for all the other ones.