I find it to be quite configurable, easy to use and quite better than the available alternatives.
Though I also tend to have ShiftIt or SizeUp installed and always use the keyboard shortcut instead.
What exactly got worse in the Finder "these days"? I don't see anything that changed for the worse since OS X 10.2 If anything, current Finder is much improved in most aspects.
>One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints.
Not sure what you mean, since the list view seems to work just fine.
This really should be laying itself out automatically - like if you hit Ctrl-Alt-Numpad+ on an Explorer window on a Windows machine, which has had the ability to present the view in a useful, readable auto-layout .. since 1995.
Why should they? I don't want the column sizes to change under me, I want them to stay as they were left. Some text labels (filename, other meta etc) could be too large to display anyway.
That said, you can double click the right divider on any column to have it expand to fit the largest of its contents.
Well, I want the window to expand to show me the content of the folder and the file metadata without me having to do anything special - no hotkeys, no special zones to remember.
This would make it actually useful, as a utility, rather than something I have to service, as a user, on a frequent basis in order to get the details I want.
It just seems so obviously broken and such an obvious feature that I can't think why it isn't being done .. nearly every other file-system explorer interface I use, on Linux and occasionally Windows, can show this information properly through auto layout without human intervention .. yet Finder is some kind of special.
The reason why the items are not sorted by date inside the groups, is because you have some other column selected as the sort column (e.g. the name, size, or whatever is the default).
You can click the "Date Modified", "Date created" or any date column you want, and then the items will be both grouped by date (into the groups you see, today, yesterday, last week, etc) AND sorted by date within the groups.
The finder could force it so that it always sorts by the item you selected to group by with, but this is more flexible.
Of course it does, since now they can click on the date column inside a group, and get the order they want for that group, in addition to the overall grouping into buckets based on date ranges.
>* I for one cannot fathom how this sorting arrangement is of use to anyone, personally ..*
Well, if I just wanted "show everything sorted by date" I could have done it in list view.
Grouped (arrangement) view shows the data in groups. What one might want the grouping to be and what the order to be inside the groups is not necessarily (if ever) the same.
E.g. if I want to look at files of a certain naming scheme that I created last week, I could set to arrange the finder items by date (so I get I nice "past week" group, today group, month group etc) and see the items inside sorted by name.
If I want the items in the groups sorted by date too -- I can just as easily.
If Finder could only use the same column to form groups that it uses to sort inside the group I couldn't do that.
This is the most flexible way -- and analogous to what all and any database systems offer, where group by column is not necessarily the same as the order by column.
One of my pet peeves with the Finder is that it still can't auto-layout the content to fit in the window - take a list view, open a folder .. and marvel at the fact that its the 21st century, but yet this list view still isn't capable of rendering itself for minimal-fit constraints. (I have to do it manually.) This is very frustrating, and I'd love to know of a solution ..