Finder is by far the worst file manager ever created.
Professionals came up with their own ways navigating through that complexity.
Most people prefer the first solution there were introduced to. So people preferring Windows Explorer were using it before Finder and vice versa.
People also don’t spend time learning their tools - that’s why you see a lot of complains in this thread for things that are right in the menu, you don’t even need to read help or ask google, just open the damn menu. And this is HN - a forum for “power” users who spend immense time using their computers.
That's just an excuse they give to justify the cycle of learned helplessness and control by Big Tech.
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.
But I see not a single comment recommending one? No good UI ones on macOS?
Lots of people like QSpace, but I’ve bumped into weird privacy issues with it every time I considered trying it. Life’s too short to worry that my file manager is spying on me.
Say what you want about Finder, but only a Windows devotee would dare put Explorer in a pile of anything to emulate. It is the worst of all possibilities and in that sense fits the host OS to a "T"
"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.
"I discovered that his Desktop contained more than 1,000 files."
I finally go the hang of downloads and documents.
Finder doesnt find crap
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.
I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.
Simple things like easily copying paths (and no, not with a weird keyboard shortcut nobody uses - a simple GUI method, preferably with an address bar, which Finder also lacks), copy queuing (pause queued copies rather than shotgun them all at once), cutting files (FFS why is this feature outright missing? There is an awkward keyboard shortcut to move a copied file but it's frankly not the same), broken views (icon view sends most files offscreen, and even maximizing doesn't bring them back into the confines of the window), idiotic keyboard shortcuts (Cmd O opens a file, Enter renames it? No other OS does this). I could go on and on.
Finder is a rare case in macOS where Windows actually outclasses it in every way.
A relatively universal aspect of macOS is that menu/context menu options can dynamically change as you hold down option. So for anyone vaguely familiar with the macOS operating system, it's easily found from a context-click or the edit menu while holding option.
If you're doing this more than once a week, it's command-option-C on Mac and control-shift-C on Windows. Learning this is as simple as any other keyboard shortcut.
Of course if you're just copying a path, chances are it's to paste into the terminal. There's an easier way. Just drag the file over the terminal.
You can still navigate by path via cmd+shift+g (this works in the file picker too), but I feel like the popup animation used to be a lot quicker on older versions. You can customize views, but to get them to actually stick you have to use an arcane incantation (delete all existing ds_store, then go to view options menu and hit "make default").
You can cut-paste but you have to use cmd+c and cmd+option+v instead of cmd+x. There is an option to merge, it only appears under conditions: only when copy/pasting and only when "alt" is held in the dialog I think.
It also is really bad at browsing networked volumes, partly due to poor defaults as it tries to litter ds_store and generate thumbnails.
Opening a new tab always takes you back to the root directory instead of cloning your existing view. All of it is stuff that could be added in a simple point update rather than a ground-up rewrite.
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.
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
I honestly think it is a matter of what you like rather than what is good or bad.
Simple to use until you need it to be complicated, then it probably does what you’re looking for.
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.
What key combo did you want that would be less 'magical'?
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.
So it's wrong to be power user using mac.
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.
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...
You can also hold Option while stopping a folder to get an additional Merge button, but at least one folder needs to have unique items.
Red/yellow/green buttons to close(?)/minimize(?)/maximize(?) windows are usability hell.
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.
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.
> 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
Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.
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.
``` src ├── app │ └── page.tsx └── components └── header.tsx ```
EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.
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.
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.
Linux users also agree that Finder sucks.
I don’t even know what “see the file system” means.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Fi...
Desktop > My Computer > C > Users > Me > Desktop
Desktop > My Computer > C > Users > Me > OneDrive > DesktopI'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.
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.
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
I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.
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 don't think it's that Finder is brilliant -- it just encourages a unique set of power user workflows that aren't replicated elsewhere.
For example, Open/Save panels that act as drop targets, and navigate to the dropped file's parent folder. I use this all the time, and it drives me nuts when I can't do this on Linux (Nautilus) and Windows. Enter to rename, too. These habits are very hard to break!
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.
This went into a direction I didn't expect at all.
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?
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
But the UI is worse.
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.
There are loads of different file managers for many different operating systems, they look and act the way they do from years of refining UX in response to the way users actually interact with them. This is why the file manager on my android phone is so similar to the one on my windows machine, and my linux install. All of them are different to Finder which appeared to lock some UX decisions in circa 1990 and then refuse to budge, this is why Finder sucks.
It's the one OS where file and folder manipulation via the terminal is actually sometimes faster for me, no need to go digging for the specific ritual Finder uses in opposition to every other file manager to do the task.
In the open and save file dialogs, the location is a dropdown containing, amongst other things, recent locations, which would list where the file ended up. I think the number of recents is configurable in System Settings.
It should also show up in the Recents sidebar entry, though I don’t use it so I’m not sure.
The save dialog sidebar is configurable, I’ve put my “inbox” there.
I agree it would be better for this to be an option, but I think the status quo is more clicks, not nothing exists.
Why is seemingly every single person on HN unhappy with the Finder?
In what ways?
Tags are nice. Can't think of anything else.
I do not understand how people can get serious work done with Windows Explorer, but I presume that's just because I'm not used to it.
By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.
Does anyone else experience this? Like it freezes when searching for programs?
The Risc OS filer remains king, largely because managing windows on Risc OS is much more tolerable.
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.
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.
"Stream" photo libraries of people who take pictures for work know this issue all too well: there's a lot of junk mixed with their personal photos. What if we had... folders: one personal and one for work or per customer.
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 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.)
But, if the person doesn’t know where the file is, Finder has a “Recent” virtual folder right a the top that’ll list all files the person worked on most recent on the top. I often use it to get to screenshots. There’s also a lot of basic operations that are there since the 1990s any power user would know.
Finder is terrible, but I switched for Forklift early on. I think it's amazing, so much better than the Gnome and KDE file managers I used before. It covers so many bases, from being a twin-pane orthodox manager, directory comparer and synchroniser, bulk regex renamer, etc. Handles local directories as well as remote ones via SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Google Drive, SMB, NFS, etc. And switching to Alfred was a real pleasure. I could see where Gnome Do took inspiration from, but it's a pale imitation. I also installed iTerm2 early on, and I use it to this day. Easily the best fit terminal for my purposes.
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
Everyone who comes to Finder from anywhere else complains. Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.
such a waste of damn good hardware though
I see people justify their Mac purchases this way all the time, but IMO it's just cope and not their actual primary reason for making that decision. I've never seen where the math actually worked out where the price/performance actually made Apple made sense.
Not just Dolphin is among the 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.
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).
Finder is full of these kinds of hidden secrets.
But MacOS keyboard shortcuts have always been undiscoverable unless they were part of the menu, which is a problem.
MacOS (the OS) is much better than Windows.
But MacOS (the user interface) is worse than Windows (or even Linux).
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.
FWIW, this is clear in the "help" link by the textarea.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchldaafb302/...
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.
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.
For copying the path of a file specifically, in Finder you can hold Option and then pick Edit → Copy as Pathname.
However, the very next keyboard they designed did have them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Plus_Exte...
I can't imagine editing text on a keyboard with no arrow keys to be any better than the horrible experience of doing it on a mobile device... which might be why Apple decided to add them quite early in the history of the Mac.
It's also ironic that despite justifying the menubar at the top of the screen as being easier to hit, they then totally missed the awkwardness of not being able to navigate with only one hand by using the arrow keys and the nearby return/enter. Watching someone experienced using Windows' file manager with only the keyboard is almost vi-like in its efficiency.
What you could do instead is just set up your favorite Linux distro in an arm64 VM and run it with UTM (a popular qemu wrapper). Works nearly flawlessly! Very usable as a daily development setup. I connect it to an external monitor and keyboard and can't believe it's not a Linux box most of the day. They even got virtualized Vulkan (almost) working now. Switching between VMs and host is trivial and you have proper virgl acceleration in VMs without fighting a lot of nonsense like I had in the past with virt-manager on Linux hardware - if you like to develop in VMs like me, this alone would justify switching from a Linux box to a Mac.
Virtualization costs me ~10-15% in multicore performance - still a bargain considering how far ahead Mac hardware is compared to anything x86. Linux arm64 is very well supported by open source these days. Just proprietary software is often behind e.g. Zoom, Slack are still missing native binaries but you could run them in a browser.
Here's a more detailed experience report (though a bit dated) from another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508 https://blog.disintegrator.dev/posts/dev-virtual-machine/
I assume it'll be a couple of years before Asahi is an option for my machine.
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.
Why would they ignore all the lessons learned between 1984 and 2001?
That's the reason why most people complain about Finder today.
Arguably it dates from NeXTSTEP so 1989.
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.
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.
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.
