I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
As a developer I've only updated my Mac around release date once. Faced so many bugs and incompatibilities that now I wait at least 2 months so both Apple & third party iron out the kinks.
Ironically in macOS 27 I've had a bunch of issues with Safari extensions. 50% of the time they don't load on their whitelisted domains. Click on their toolbar icon and they pop in.
Yea I just swapped my jogging/beach iPhone from an Xr to an iPhone 12 and wow, it's so much better than the Xr and pretty much as good as my "proper" phone, an 17Pro. It's got 4G RAM instead of 12G but it performs almost as well. Xr->12 is a huge leap in performance and I noticed it straight away. But the 12 against the 17 is much harder to see the difference. Less redraw of icons on the main screen is the primary thing I've noticed.
Not just a model - It's a diffusion model. Instead of Next Token prediction it builds the entire page at once and then denoises it. Kind of mind blowing when you watch it happen.
Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion
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
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.
As a Mac user since the 1980s, I feel feel like Finder is easily best in class, even after ten or fifteen years of design. I would describe Windows Explorer as “embarrassingly bad” in comparison, despite having a good hold on the shortcuts.
I honestly think it is a matter of what you like rather than what is good or bad.
> As a Mac user since the 1980s, I feel feel like Finder is easily best in class
Once internal muscle memory is established, the usability problems can be easily dismissed; but for the rest of us, who got used to better file managers, Finder is atrocious.
As a Windows user in the 90s, Linux user in the 2000s, and Mac user since the 2010s, I dread the moments when I have to use Finder.
What do you like about the other file managers over the Finder?
Finder has column view and quicklook. If there’s something that I’m missing out on from, say, Explorer or Thunar or whatever, I’d love to hear it. Whenever I have to sort through a lot of files on Linux or Windows, I get a better experience by exporting a SMB share and sorting on a Mac.
The only file managers that I’ve used that felt competitive with the Mac are tools like Midnight Commander (or the original Norton version).
But also I can use JK to navigate down/up instead of moving my hand of their resting positions to the cursor.
And NM you jump faster by 5 files.
And the ability to change shortcuts easily
And the ability to use double tap C to copy file name, and tap C then tap F to copy full file path.
And turn column view into a flat list of all files at or below the current dir for easier search
And instant search (with the help of Everything) limited to the current dir+children, shown in the same file manager list with the same navigation option
And the ability to tap Cmd-R multiple files to select rename file full name/name/extension
And the ability to autoreplace illegal filesystem file chars with my own alternative to preserve those Divide/Rule common document names
And the ability to automatically control how much space a column is wasting.
Etc., a million of other things that differentiate a real pro file manager from the toy of Finder
To be honest, a lot of these seem to have the shape, “I want to be able to press button A to do action X,” but for the Finder, you have to press button B instead. I was hoping for something a little more interesting.
Things like, “In a Real Pro file manager, you can double-tap C to copy a filename, but in Finder, you have to press command-C.” Do you see why I’m a little disappointed by this list?
I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too.
Don't close your mind to new knowledge and it might just get interested!
> but in Finder, you have to press command-C.” Do you see why I’m a little disappointed by this list?
Sure I do, you're doing the lazy cut. The original quote was:
> double tap C to copy file name, and tap C then tap F to copy full file path.
And of course you can't do that in Finder, that's just nonsense. Now also add a few more actions: copy file name without the extension, copy the extension, copy full path quoted for pasting in your terminal - and
A. You've run out of keys and modifiers, and definitely out of memory to remember which action does what
B. C. D. It's actually not trivial to extend Finder in this way, and of course you can't easily change the keybinds, and of course you can't group those keybinds in a conveniently located submenu, and of course you can't assigne custom key modifiers to those menus for ease of navigation..
Also pray do tell which command-C you need to press to achieve this:
> (cycle) rename file full name/name/extension
There are also a few non-keybinding-related things in the list which you've conveniently ignored
Your list seems very preference-shaped, not pointing to actually-missing features I can see. You could make a case about discoverability, but it's hard to see how letter combinations that only work within one application and no others are easily memorized. If your habits mean you spend a lot of time working with files in a UI, then memorizing double-tap C and C+F might be easy for you. Otherwise, using the same Cmd+C and Opt+Cmd+C would have the benefit of doing what it does in nearly every other program. Or, as the other responder said, dragging auto-escapes appropriately.
I spend most of my time using a CLI, and I'm not claiming Finder is the best keyboard-driven file manager out there, but I will say that it's consistent, and works the way macOS works. Key combos work the way they work in every app, and holding down Opt updates the Edit menu to make it clear what would be different. You can do the most common things pretty easily and clearly, even if sometimes you have to use a mouse and right-click. There are also third-party apps for focused file management for pros, including some that use tuis, like ranger.
> Opt+Cmd+C would have the benefit of doing what it does in nearly every other program
So what do you think it does in Preview? In TextEdit? Are you not aware that you imaginary benefit doesn't exist even in the system default open file Finder window where you can't copy file path?
> Finder is fine: not the best, not the worst.
Very astute observation relevant to none of the things being discussed.
> Your list seems very preference-shaped, not pointing to actually-missing features I can see
Look closer! Besides that hard to say what you missed because you haven't said anything specific
For example, what is "preference-shaped" about this missing feature
> turn column view into a flat list of all files at or below the current dir for easier search
> it's hard to see how letter combinations that only work within one application and no others are easily memorized
It's very easy to see if you don't ignore use cases and add extra conditions. Like why does it universally have to be easy?? I mean, it doesn't even have to be easy for me, the extra convenience might be worth the effort of having to remember it
> might be easy for you. Otherwise
What do you mean "otherwise"? Why would you care about others to the detriment of your own ease?
> and holding down Opt updates the Edit menu
What does this have to do with anything? You can retain the visual updates of these menus even if you use sequence of keys! Press C and the copy command menu expands into a submenu of what you could copy next (path, extension, name). You'll retain your consistency at a higher ergonomic baseline for Finder, nothing stops the improvements here
> Or, as the other responder said, dragging auto-escapes appropriately.
And as I've replied there, it doesn't do that "appropriately"
> third-party apps for focused file management for pros
But that's exactly what I said!
> differentiate a real pro file manager from the toy of Finder
> Don't close your mind to new knowledge and it might just get interested!
Please be respectful in these conversations—I’m interested in hearing more about this, but the comments you’ve been making are emotionally charged and insulting.
I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too. Sorry for repeating the question—but I’m not going to accuse you of “conveniently ignoring” the question. Accusing someone of conveniently ignoring a question is, I don’t know, at best just rude. Don’t do that.
I know that there are things that Finder is not good at, that’s fine by me. What baffles me is the comparison with Windows Explorer, and that’s why I responded, and that’s the context for my comments. If you have a comparison with a specific other file manager in mind I’d like to hear it. For my use cases, I am often sorting through large quantities of media files, so I value things like column view and Quicklook.
(Copy without extension is enter, command-C. Full path 95% of the time, I am pasting into the Terminal, and so I drag it in, and the terminal automatically escapes it.)
You spend more time saying you're interested than on discussing the topic of interest! And if you care about respect, don't start by trivializing the the argument
> but I’m not going to accuse you of “conveniently ignoring” the question.
You just have, though in a worse "passive aggressive" way that's harder to address, but also in a way that doesn't even make sense - how is focusing only on features, not apps, "convenient" for me??? It was for you because otherwise your defense of Finder doesn't work.
Also it's not just one app (though primarily the list is based on Opus), some of the improvements are sprinkled across different file manager, like on Mac Marta (while being rather incomplete) has a few things I miss when using Finder.
You also don't seem to know how hate sounds, I don't hate either of those apps (not even Finder). Why are you emotionally charging the conversation?
> What baffles me is the comparison with Windows Explorer
Then talk to the people doing the comparison! I'm not one of them, I've responded to a different point.
> For my use cases, I am often sorting through large quantities of media files, so I value things like column view and Quicklook.
And one of the points I raised in my comparison that is not a fake "but Cmd-C is the same as C" is the ability to customize UI to give more space to your precious media files, especially when you add various columns that have media information that can be blank or very long!
Or if you value quicklook you might be interested in an embedded alternative that doesn't obscure the file list by always popping in the center instead of a dedicated panel. Or the that doesn't reset zoom on file change. Or the one that does resize whitespace to only fit the image. Or the one that doesn't waste your time and mess with your focus with animations.
There is, of course, an endless list of deficiencies behind any serious workflow in Finder with better alternatives in other apps
> Copy without extension is enter, command-C.
Nice try, but no. That's two commands, which means you can't use a better key bind, but also the second command fails if the first one does, which it does, for example, in admin folders
>Full path 95% of the time, I am pasting into the Terminal, and so I drag it in, and the t
Besides having no option for the other 5% of the time, this also fails in shells using different escaping mechanism, and even in bashes it uses the ugliest escape mechanism of adding visual noise of \ for every space. Quoting was mentioned for a reason!
Also dragging instead of C, Cmd-V is a big ergonomic failure
Lastly, I don't think that's Finder that's doing the substandard escaping
Our KDE development motto (and a contrast explained in our HIG) is "Simple by default, powerful when needed". It's nice to see someone re-state it so naturally and eloquently in the wild!
I have been a hardcore Konqueror user back in the days. Early dolphin felt like a back step. Nowadays, thought, it easily outshines Konqueror. I still miss a few KIOs which were showcased in Konqueror. I guess they were discontinued.
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 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.)
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.
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.
When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe how 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...
But not changed enough, I can't merge everything from the top, I can only do that whenever the first Mergeable conflict appears, but there could be a bunch more of conflicts with Replace option only
Of course MacOS asks you what you want to do when you copy over a folder and has done so forever. The keyboard shortcut to show hidden files has been mentioned already (it's even a logical one for once in Apple-Land) and the terminal command is straightforward and logical as well. Should they include a perma-toggle in the UI as well? I, personally, think yes but I also think it's pretty consistent with a certain approach to UI design to not include said button.
To Apple, files are an unsightly thing they need to sweep under the carpet, if you have to interact with files they probably believe they’ve done something wrong.
Look at Apple Mail, they used to bury attachments behind a button and even now they just drop them at the end of the email.
Ignorance of how computers work is a moat. One that Apple influenced the entire industry to adopt.
Same reason the Church didn't want to translate the Bible into the vernacular. If you can read the Bible you don't need a priest, or at the least you can evaluate your priest knowledgeably and decide to go to a different one.
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.
This suggests that you were genuine in not knowing. But had you never done a quick web search? It's the kind of thing that I'd feel compelled to find whether I could change the behavior to fit what I would prefer.
Anyway, if you're unaware, here are a couple useful shortcuts for kbd-driven navigation: Command-Down (arrow) to dig one level down the file tree and Command-Up (arrow) to move to the enclosing directory / folder. I use it many times a day all day long.
The problem I've been having is that in Word "Recents" is selected by default.
So I pull down that menu and it's useless (full of random Recent folders)
The comment above made me realise if I pick "Documents" in the left hand side, that top menu changes from having a bunch of useless "Recents" in it and exposes the filesystem.
No I've never thought to Google how to use the Finder - it seems like that one thing that should be super intutitve - I've never had to Google how to use any other filesystem manager, Windows or Linux. Or iOS. Or Android.
“Recents” is not Finder. That’s actually Microsoft’s useleas UI. It would be far more usable if they did just open the real system file picker. (Msft messed this up on Windows too.)
Yea so it seems my frustrations come from not understanding the file picker isn't the finder. Anyway I've learnt a few things, so thanks everyone. I feel less powerless now.
But this is like the same as windows explorer right? It opens whatever view you used for the app (say, “recents”) and then you click something in the sidebar to go to the “real” filesystem?
I also didn't know how to do that, and I'm certain that I've looked it up at some point. It's just so unintuitive that I'd need to do it daily to remember
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.
I find Explorer slow and frustrating, while Finder works but is basic and cumbersome and useless for anything more than basic opening or moving.
I remember outstanding file managers way back in the MS-DOS days. Sidekick, QuickDOS, and Norton Commander were great.
My take is that expert users use the terminal while regular users don’t like to do much with files. So there’s no push for a powerful graphical file manager.
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.
Windows file I/O has always felt slower than Linux, Mac, anything. Still does. I don’t know what’s wrong with it or why it’s unfixable.
SSDs make it tolerable… not by fixing it but by being fast enough to hide it. Back in the spinning disc days you could tell a windows machine by how much kerchunking the drive was doing.
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
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.
You greybeard wannabes all have a serious problem: you think tech is made for you and for you alone.
Once computers became accessible beyond the hobbyist, enthusiast or professional it became a necessity to guarantee that those people that click on anything they are told to click cannot break their computers simply working the file explorar app.
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
You can still do whatever you want with your file system. Except that if you want to break into it and mess with it, you have to actually know what you are doing.
People who were not hobbyists learned to use computers, in large numbers, so I don't think your conclusion is accurate. Anyone can learn this stuff with a bare minimum of effort.
A file system, especially a local one, invites interoperability and control over one's data. Hiding this from users makes it more difficult for them to have that control, and now they have to rely on the application vendor to do in a proprietary way, what would otherwise be a simple file operation.
Computers don't have to have file systems. The history of personal computing has had more time with file systems being hidden, than with them being visible, and if you weight by the number of users, over 90%.
As a dos/windows/linux users my whole life, I got asked by some family a few years back to get photos off of a mac from a deceased family member. I pulled off everything I could find, but I was never sure I actually found everything because I basically had to just search for different image types, but had no real way to browse to actual folders where things were stored.
It's a Unix system under the fancy UI. Of course there are folders and of course you can go to them. You can also grep in the terminal or whatever you are used to do from Linux to your heart's content.
Personally, I think the representation of the directory tree in Linux and MacOS is equally jarring for a person who has grown up with DOS and Windows. It certainly was for me when I peeked my head out of Bill-Gates-Land as a teenager.
obviously there are folders there with files in them, but finding them using the built in tools is a huge pain in the ass and it's impossible to be confident you actually searched them all.
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
That’s easy. Because if they accept that emacs is good enough, they have to then accept that probably whatever thing they’re building is almost certainly worthless.
26 different browsers all based on Chromium, 127 different “observability platforms” etc.
So so much redundant rehashed stuff. We can’t accept that though, THIS TIME it’s going to be great and amazing and we’ll get a huge investment and sold to a huge company for millions.
I’m not suggesting that it hasn’t been a huge leap in computing and software in the last 40 years.
But we need to have faith in new being better to keep going. That’s why the new hotness is always so popular.
That was my thought too. It failed amazingly at the task yet they were still thinking it was helpful. I had to go back and reread bits because I thought I’d missed a bit where Gemini hadn’t cocked up.
Very odd conclusion to an otherwise interesting experiment.
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