This would be an example of the 10% of the UI which isn't identical.
One of the fundamental differences between macOS and Windows is the menu bar. There's only one at a time, and it belongs to the program which has the focus. A corollary of this is that you don't need a window to have a program.
It's not just Finder, most macOS programs are perfectly happy having no window open.
I've been on OS X since 2003, and it took me a second to figure out what you were talking about here, because if I don't see the window I expect to see, my eyes immediately flick to the upper-left corner. If I see what I expect to see, I've probably already typed Cmd-N or Cmd-O, depending.
There's a lot to complain about with Finder; my personal peeve is that I want two-finger-swipe-right to go back one directory, like the back button in browsers. But this particular behavior is just macOS working the way that it does. If you close all open windows in Preview and quit, then start it again, it will do the same thing.
I find OSX to be generally pretty logical and easy to understand, but certainly no more _intuitive_ than something like Windows. Another way of saying this: if I took someone who didn't know how to use a desktop OS, I wouldn't be any more confident sitting them down in front of a Mac.
They should be consistent, discoverable, and customizable.
I give macOS full marks for consistency, and a passing grade for customizable, but it's hardly discoverable! I read these kinds of HN posts because of all the little tips and tricks I find.
Operating systems used to come with a thick manual, and you could buy an even thicker "missing manual" book at the local bookstore. macOS could use one of those.
I think that's what 'intuitive' means, practically, in this context.
Of course, physical things are losing buttons. I guess kids will refer to things as 'tap the tappy spot' or some such.
But then there are core features like "a file icon on a document window can be dragged exactly like a file icon in the finder" that you can use macOS for years and never find. That's before they started hiding the file icons in Big Sur!
macOS is packed with little things like that.
I think it's fine that they hid it, since even before, the things you can do with it (dragging, cmd/ctrl-clicking) were already hidden.
The only old functionality that is lost with Big Sur is that you could glance at the icon to see if there are unsaved changes (if so, the icon would be dimmed). But you can still tell by looking for the dot in the red close button.
One thing that's killer for me in MacOS vs Windows, regarding consistency, is text fields. They always behave the same (except, of course, for weird apps, say ms office). CMD+Backspace will delete a whole word even in password fields or system settings, etc. This is always hit or miss in Windows. I know it doesn't work for passwords. In Windows explorer it works... sometimes. It works in the address bar, but not in the preferences or when renaming a file.
why ?
I find the "app-less desktop" of Windows and all the Linux DE's I've tried (i.e. the big ones) far more weird and infuriating. It's easy to lose context of what app is focused, since a slight dimming of buttons isn't quite as obvious as I'd like. Reading the word of the app in the menu bar, even if it's just through my peripheral vision, makes the focus behavior far more obvious.
And an "app-less desktop" more or less necessitates that you now dedicate an entire meta/super/Windows/whatever key to the window manager, which is just such a waste of keyboard real estate, as well as a driver for key command inconsistency. In macOS, Cmd+N will (nearly) always make a new window for the app that you're in; Cmd+W will close it; Cmd+Q will quit it. In Windows, Cmd+N works for everything, but to make my first file explorer window, I have to hit Windows+E. And to quit an app, it's...Alt+F4, for some reason?
The trickle-down effects of this design are endless -- I've just laid out the basics of the basics here.
I have used Windows setups with as many as 50 screens (command and control center). Having each application exist within its own window with all relevant menus in that window is, by far, a superior approach in these settings.
Even with three large monitors, using a mouse to fly across that screen space to reach a menu is just a pain. Imagine a system consisting of 25 x 4 screens. It would be a nightmare.
Shortcuts? Someone else said MacOS lacks discoverability. It’s true. Tooltips are almost nowhere to be found and lots of applications have no shortcuts. I have watched non-expert users in fear of clicking a button because they have no clue what it does.
The single menu and single mouse button idea worked well on an old Mac with a single 9 in screen. It works fine on laptops. The minute the display grows in size and multiple displays are used the approach breaks down very quickly.
If you own a multi-monitor Mac setup (we have several) and have enabled the menu bar on all screens, you already understand how broken that concept has become. If it was not you would only have one menu bar with your three large screens.
I typed in wrong window more times than I would like to admit because of this stupid singe menu bar design.
And we don't want "OS focus" to follow the mouse! That would pop windows to the front, change the menu bar, and other unfortunate consequences: if I were mousing up toward the menu and accidentally crossed another window, I'd get the wrong menu.
What we want is for keyboard focus to also follow the mouse, and there's not actually any inherent reason why this can't happen. It's just that they're tightly coupled by the implementation, to the point where an extension can't un-couple them.
The lack of (keyboard) focus-follows-mouse is the big fly in my macOS ointment, it annoys me whenever I'm on my widescreen, which is at least half of the time. I do think it would be possible to implement a usable f-f-m which still worked the way macOS does with respect to menus, which windows get priority, and so on.
It would require uncoupling some things under the hood, which would probably affect the API in an incompatible way, so I don't expect to ever see it happen unfortunately.
The only occasional pain point I encounter is when apps like Zoom automatically switch to "full screen mode".
There's also the option in Mission Control for "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application". If that feature is turned off, then you could, for example, have Chrome on _every_ desktop. Then it's just a matter of Cmd+tab to Chrome, and Cmd+n to open a new window on whichever display/desktop has the current focus.
For window management, I've found BetterSnapTool to be essential. It provides the typical window snapping from Windows. Better yet, you can setup keyboard shortcuts to quickly snap a window to the left side, right side, maximize, or move it to the next monitor. The shortcuts I use mimic Vim bindings, so it's easy to remember [1].
With caps locks remapped to Control in the Keyboard preferences, moving and re-sizing "windows" across multiple displays is fast & easy.
But I'm probably missing something with your particular use-case.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=... [1] https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN
What's interesting is that Apple explicitly chose to ignore what I will go-ahead and call the de-facto standard established across pretty much every desktop GUI by a range of vendors. I have worked on Solaris, Irix, IBM OS2, Amiga OS (owned an original machine signed by the development team), Linux, Windows and MacOS. The odd duck is anything Apple made.
No reason for it whatsoever. Proof? Billions of non-engineers around the world do not seem to have any issues whatsoever operating a Windows machine, which inherits from all of the standards I mentioned above.
The gist of the thread was to somehow characterize Macs as easier and intuitive to use. That simply isn't and has not been the case for a very long time. Expert users, engineers, coders cannot be the test subjects for this evaluation. You just said that a tool you use is easy to remember because the shortcuts mimic VIM bindings. That is beyond foreign to average or below-average users like my mother, father, uncle, the local doctor, teacher, restaurant employee, etc.
No issues with the average user running MacOS on a single small screen. The abstraction works well there. The problems start once you expand beyond that.
I was recently involved in a display characterization project where we had somewhere around eight 4K+ displays attached to a PC. We also evaluated Apple's Pro Display XDR connected as the second display on an Apple laptop (I forget which one).
Using the PC (running Windows) to address every display, run calibration tools on each one and run custom characterization code was an absolute breeze. Doing the same with the Apple XDR was an ordeal. And, to make things worse, using the touchpad to navigate across the entire canvas was just horrific.
I do like Macs. I just don't think they live up to the hype. Easy and cool to use for unsophisticated users on a single screen up to a point. The problem with not making users learn anything is that they will always remain naive users.
Imagine if everyone was forced to use a GUI text editor with simple controls and you did not have the option to use VIM. That's the difference. One assumes the user is an idiot. The other considers the idea that users can actually do more than point and click with a single button on a single menu bar.
Not trying to be nasty at all. I just think Apple takes things to an undesirable extreme at times. They carry this through to the iPhone, where you now have such overloading on controls that nobody knows what they do. I lost track, I think we got up to triple-clicking the home button? And no camera shutter button (no, the volume button isn't a good solution, as the many pictures of my left foot can attest).
Anyhow, good technology. I just don't agree with the choices they seem to make again and again.
The Mac had a functioning UI in the 1980s before the “defacto standards” appeared (I believe would be in the 1990s) would that explain some of the discrepancies?
No problem with that at all. Being opinionated is fine. No issues there.
One way to look at it is that Apple, as a computer company, was a failure. They were on the edge of becoming insolvent. In fact, most Apple users don't know that Microsoft/Bill Gates rescued Apple from meeting an unsightly end by investing $150 million (maybe more, I don't remember) into the company. This would be equivalent to a billion dollar+ investment today.
What saved Apple was the iPhone. Plain and simple. The computer portion of their business was crashing and burning. Note that I am not ascribing this impending doom to the choices made for the GUI at all. Just reviewing some history.
Sometimes being very different is cool, and sometimes it isn't.
Let's look at it from a very different frame of reference. All browsers today work and feel about the same to a casual user --the general public. If someone insisted on delivering one that behaved and looked very different from the standards developed over time, they would not find a great deal of adoption. Microsoft did the right thing in dropping their failed browser and adopting Chromium. That is an example of a good decision made based on how standards evolved outside of their own efforts. Late, sure, but they were opinionated about browsers and eventually understood they were wrong.
That's what Macs felt like to the rest of the world. Weird. Perhaps unnecessarily weird. As the world was getting used to having a capable computer on every desk, Apple, in my opinion, continued to shoot itself in the foot by not listening to a user base 10x to 100x the size of their at all.
You can do that, of course, but when your company ends-up at the edge of failure and you have to be rescued by your competitor...maybe it's time to rethink your approach.
Apple insisted on silly things, like having a single mouse button and, yes, a single menu bar. As I said before, the single menu bar makes sense for some single small screen use-cases, but it quickly falls apart once you go big and multiple screens. There's also the effect of having multiple windows belonging to multiple applications strewn about your screen or screens with no clear association to a single application. I remember the early days of this. It was a mess. The difference between running something like Photoshop on Windows vs. a Mac, was night and day. One was clean and organized. The other was a mess of windows everywhere. What I am using for this use-case evaluation was the reaction of my daughter who had been learning tools such as GIMP and Photoshop on a PC and then saw how Photoshop ran on a Mac. She wanted nothing to do with it.
Anyhow, I am not here to downgrade Apple computers. They are fine. Very usable. Lots of people love them and, in my opinion, pay ridiculous amounts of money for them. All I am saying is that Apple could have made an effort to still be opinionated while giving users the choices they were already making elsewhere. That's an important point. The PC world has been an amazing experiment from day one. For the most part choices were made by users. There have been massive failures in that universe. Users voted with their purchases every step of the way. And that's how we got where we are. Were it not for Microsoft/Bill Gates and, later, the iPhone, it is quite possible the Mac would have died long ago. This was a technology imposed on users from above. I think I can say it is very rare to see that kind of thing survive in the long term. I still remember when Apple decided to move away from the PowerPC platform and killed off every customer's investment in software. In the PC world, like it or not, the issue of compatibility across transitions was incredibly important, hence the slow-but-steady evolution rather than having radical step changes in technology.
To some degree I equate some of what Tesla is doing to this effect. Today, if you analyze their financials, Tesla would be out of business if they had to rely on car sales. A harsher way to put it is that their electric car business is a failure. Had it not been for carbon credits they would have imploded, or, at the very least, would have had to raise tons of capital to burn for a few more years. The truth is simple: As much as I like electrics, nobody wants them. Not at scale. And the reasons are somewhat similar to the Apple issues (if we contort thing around). If the GUI, other platform choices and cost are relabeled as "infrastructure", the electric car isn't desirable to the vast majority of the population due to infrastructure issues. There are approximately 1.4 billion conventional cars in the world vs. about 10 million electrics. If you look at the energy required to replace the fleet of IC cars (to manufacture the cars, batteries, charging stations, etc.) and the massive step-change in electric power generation, it is very easy to conclude the idea is far closer to ridiculous on any time horizon shorter than 50 to 100 years.
Anyhow, it's a fun bit of computing history.
The core difference is that macOS is (originally) document-oriented. You could care less if an app is opened or not, window == document, whereas on Windows, window == program.
Each progressively grew into the direction of the other (e.g Finder progressively losing spatial features and Explorer gaining them, MDI interfaces on macOS vs the win7 taskbar being actually more of a Dock...)
If I have some document editor open, and I close all the documents, what should happen?
Should it quit? Well if I wanted to quit, I would have done so.
Should it display some blank pane? Why? To let me know it's still running? The menu bar does that!
I say it should close that last window, and then I can open up another one and keep working.
In other words, I want to have a "menubar-only" app every time I'm done with all the windows I had open, and intend to open more. This happens frequently enough that I'm glad macOS works the way it does.
Should whether an application is running or not be a concern to you? Why would you ever want to actually quit an application?
Granted, I understand that in reality the app might be misbehaving, hogging resources and whatnot and that the underlying OS isn't perfect and we should absolutely have control over how our hardware is utilized, but from a UX PoV I think the notion of a running process isn't of interest to me unless I am developing software.
If I close a window, I just want to get it out of my way. I only leave things running as a workaround to the possible slow cold start the program may present.
same reason why I want the parts of my house that I rarely go to to be tidy ?
If you close all the tabs in a browser window, should it close the window or display a new tab page? Or just do nothing but show an empty tab bar and a blank window pane? That seems like the worst possible solution, because it always requires more clicks to do whatever you were intending to do. At least closing the window or opening a new tab will save you some clicks 50% of the time.
If I close all the tabs in a browser window, the window should disappear, yes. If I close all the windows, the browser should stay open, so I can start another window if I want to.
That's the whole point of this user affordance, there's a difference between closing the last window and closing the browser! If I want to close a whole window at once, that's Shift-Cmd-W, Cmd-W closes just one tab, and this works for any tabbed window on any native Mac app.
No amount of Cmd-W will quit the application, and Cmd-Q will always quit the application, maybe prompting and maybe not. They're unrelated commands, especially since most applications will save your windows and that's most often what I want to have happen.
This is, particularly for a novice or intermediate user IMO quite intimidating. It means there is some learnt behavior + keyboard command required to "see anything" and work with the program. If I'm using my trackpad/mouse trying to work out after I start a program why I can't see anything like I've seen new Mac users do for some time it isn't great. Because there is no window its easy to click anywhere else in my search for my "missing program" and immediately lose the "menu bar" that allows you to (Cmd-N) or discover the ability to do that. It's almost like the app never booted up.
Sure you can learn behavior and work around it as I and you have had to do, but if the menu bar behavior changes per window focus anyway I don't see the difference than Windows with menu bar on the window other than "its the Mac way".
(I don't think it's a good thing to keep applications running when the last window is closed, but that's a different argument)
- There's no way to create an empty file
- There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work)
- There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned
- ~~Tags are useless and just take up space for nothing~~ This one is entirely subjective. I retract it.
- No "parent folder"...
There's some great features in Finder but it sucks at so many things it's just frustrating to use. Windows Explorer is infinitely better. It has less cool features (no tabs for instance) but is so much better to actually use.
I get that some features are hidden to avoid confusing non savvy users, but preventing experimented users to do basic stuff is criminal.
This is one of the features I never miss and don't use on any other DE (like KDE). I just open the app, create the file and save. Maybe it's just habit, but I personally doesn't find it as a needed feature.
> There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work)
Just drag it where you want while pressing CMD? I know it's not cut but it prevents a lot of errors I think.
> There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned
It's called "Clean Up By". Available in right click menu and in the top menu probably. It'll always keep the order you choose.
> Tags are useless and just take up space for nothing.
On the contrary, this is something I love. I can just throw a bunch of files to a folder and tag them about what I'm going to do with them. Colors allow me to mentally sort them with no overhead.
> No "parent folder"...
Two-finger click to folder name on the finder. The path will be revealed as a reverse-ordered stack. Or just press back. It's parent folder 99% of the time.
To give perspective, I do weekly. I work often files that I need to modify or create files that have no native apps with UI. Key files, certs, etc.
Also, its way easier when working to just create file in already open dir than go open a program and try to navigate to the dir you already are. Eg local web development, I'm 10 dir deep somewhere obscure place.
I'm on windows.
Try making this trick work when your destination is three levels deep into a different hierarchy. Oh yes, you should have thought about it beforehand and opened two windows and pre-arranged them in a way so you can drag from one to another, because it's so intuitive! And yes, the metaphor of "take from one place, drop into other", which worked with documents, is completely broken, but somehow we pretend it still exists. And the worst thing - there's no reason for it to be this broken. It just is.
> It's called "Clean Up By". Available in right click menu and in the top menu probably.
I just checked, it's always greyed out on my finder. Who knows why, it's probably intuitive.
> Or just press back. It's parent folder 99% of the time.
Except no, it's the folder which you saw before that, which doesn't have to be parent at all.
I regularly do this to be honest. I drag the file to my home or Dropbox folder and dive from there. I also regularly drag and drop files from finder to any other application, not just three folders, but three desktops away. It might not be OK or comfortable for you (which I understand), but writing with laser-cut assumptions and prejudice doesn't help.
> I just checked, it's always greyed out on my finder. Who knows why, it's probably intuitive.
If you're in list view, you can always click column headers, just like a particular Redmond OS allows to do. Also there's a sort by menu, which is operational in all views as I just checked. I think again a particular Redmond OS also calls this strange and magical ordering process the same.
macOS works differently, and it goes against some conventions on other OSes, I know. However, I don't get agitated by this, because how it's evolved and it's consistent in its own world. I actually like how it doesn't imitate anything else. It's same for Linux. Again backwards in some parts, but consistent in its universe of things.
The funny thing is, I booted my Windows disk this weekend for steam stuff and for keeping the OS up to date, and a lot of things felt backwards. However, this is again consistent in Windows universe and it's OK.
Again, I want to reiterate that, there's no one-and-only-one correct way to do things. We need to embrace this differences. This is what moves UI/UX research forward. I personally don't whine. Just adapt and love how quirky a UI is. If it's that broken, I patch it, or just submit bug reports.
No, I mentioned old UNIXen, Linux, and other OSes on my other comments. I do not bring them to table since Linux and other UNIXen Desktop Environments are much more flexible and can be customized to much greater extent, so if something feels wrong, it can be modified easily.
I put Windows vs. macOS because they're arguably the most popular consumer OSes on the market right now. Personally I don't use Windows unless I want to play some games (which happens twice a year at most) or need to manage my parents' computers.
I probably came accross as a macOS fanboy, but I'm actually not (honestly sorry about that). I just like the philosophy behind it and how fast and efficiently can work on that. I can work as efficiently on Linux too (and it's my primary OS on my workstations for ~20 years or so).
The thing I don't agree is labeling of any system of being incapable of something while it's certainly capable but this capability is built with a different design/philosophy and works somewhat differently. If these comments were about Windows, I'd be defending it and its heritage. If it was about Linux, I would certainly do the same with the same enthusiasm.
At the end of the day, it's not fanboyism about and OS, but a rather sympathy for the machine. Understanding how its innards work with as a result of different thinking and how one needs to be flexible and needs to look a little differently to the matter at hand, which is a very useful trait to have.
I love Apple products and to be honest I generally like macOS too but these responses are ridiculous.
I generally disable "Clean Up By" because I love to visually group my folders for some types of folders. e.g.: Assets there, source files here, readme and docs to that corner, etc.
However, sometimes an orderly folder is required and I enable Clean Up By date for example. That folder is always sorted by date.
or CMD+UP
> or CMD+UP
There's also a control that lets you jump to any ancestor directories, but it's not enabled by default.
That requires you to have both places visible on the screen at the same time. It's also a mouse+keyboard interaction, the least usbale kind of interaction.
You can drag a file across tabs, folders, dive in folders in finder, drag it across desktops and more.
> It's also a mouse+keyboard interaction, the least usbale kind of interaction.
I don't know you, but my left hand is on the keyboard all the time, and my thumb is on the command almost 99% percent of the time. It's just an instinct-like action for me.
Also, you can use cmd+opt+v it seems. TIL that.
Speaking about discoverability, I've just found it a few minutes ago searching for "move" in the help menu.
That will show the full path along the bottom, and you can move to any parent folder by double-clicking on it--which is, perhaps, not exactly intuitive :-).
And you cannot apply it to all folders across the entire system. Why they still haven't fixed tis, is beyond me.
Try pressing cmd+j on a finder window.
When I checked on my El Capitan Mac (an Early 2008, non unibody MacBook Pro), opening my home folder in icon view and opening view options shows almost the exact screenshot I've shared on my previous comment, including "use as default button".
Moreover, any view except tri-column view produces a view options menu with "use as defaults" button. It has to be a real folder. All My Files is a view and is subject to different treatment. It may be the same with tri-column view because parent-sibling is blurred with multi-level view.
Basically:
If you open a folder from a "shortcut" from the sidebar, and press Cmd+J, you get the barren options from the screenshot: https://imgur.com/3meteoB. And it doesn't matter if you keep clicking on other folders
Since I always use just a few folders linked from the sidebar, that's what I would always get.
To get to the "actual finder window", you have to select a folder, and press Cmd + Down to "open it". Visually, nothing changes. But the View Options do: https://imgur.com/EJuqWDC
It still doesn't have the "set as default", but, at the very least, it now looks more like your screenshot.
I'm literally at a loss for words.
Edit: more over, if you Cmd+Tab back, and your current folder is a subfolder of an item in the sidebar, the Cmd-J panel resets back to its barren view. Why?!!
Edit: I guess that "barren view" only happens when viewing things as "columns" mode. I just figured out how to make it look like yours. I always use list mode (as I often want to see/sort by date modified time or file type and I want to see file sizes). Columns view seems like a waste of screen real estate.
It has nothing to do with the sidebar. In column view it doesn't know what folder you're viewing so there's no display settings it can set because that's a per-folder option.
Edit2: I see your "less barren" options now, but it's still missing several options. And you don't need to do "Cmd+down", you can just double click a folder. This presumably forces it into understanding you're talking about a specific folder so it can display additional options.
Also it doesn't even appear to work, those extra options showing up is apparently a bug as none of the options change anything.
Finder is seriously broken
Personally, I'd recommend just not using the Column view. It seems pretty janky compared to the other options.
For what it's worth, Command+[ and Command+] will move back/forward between folders, just like Safari and elsewhere.
Holding down Shift with those commands will move between tabs in Finder.
Finder can do that too, but it doesn't show you it can do that. You have to know. I recently got a Macbook from work, partially because a Mac-fan coworker had been bugging me to switch from Windows to Mac. At some point I was showing something and typed a path straight into Finder, which blew his mind! He'd been using Macs for ages, and he just wasn't aware that Finder could do that. He learned something useful and new, but it's also quite telling that even some experienced Mac users aren't aware of the existence of such a vital feature.
Finder does that too. I didn't list it because it can be configured, which is IMO a sensible default for standard users.
>But there's one thing it gets right: it shows you where you are, and you can edit that to go anywhere.
YES! Finder allows to display a breadcrumb at the bottom, but the simplest way to go anywhere is Cmd+Shift+G. It sucks as a shortcut, and even then it's inferior to Explorer.
It's actually the opposite. The view for each folder is dependent on what's inside, and if Explorer is unable to decide, it defaults to Details view.
For example, dragging the Documents folder into a terminal pane becomes:
/Users/<username>/DocumentsBut dragging a file doesn't seem to be so easy anymore; half the time, it wants to rename the file instead. No idea why. I also thought it used to be possible to drag a pdf or other document that I have open in an app, to an email and attach it that way. That doesn't seem to work anymore.
One of the problems addressing some of the issues you raised Is that you are not really explaining what you want to do. All you do is complain why Mac doesn’t work exactly like windows. Instead you should figure out what you want to do and explore and learn how that is accomplished on a Mac.
If I'm not accustomed to macOS after using it exclusively for more than 2 years, that shows where it sucks. There's plenty of things that I love on macOS: Spotlight, three-finger moves, even the weird fullscreen mode because it works so well with the pad. But the finder just sucks. That's it. It's not the end of the world and doesn't make macOS crappy. It's just a bad app.
> - There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned
Press CMD-J to open up the visual option, you can auto group and sort, snap to grid (unsorted), choose a default view.
> - No "parent folder"...
You can either press CMD-UpArrow or just right click on the title bar to see all the folders above it.
> It has less cool features (no tabs for instance) but is so much better to actually use.
Windows Explorer is also missing column view, which is a much faster way to navigate the file system completely with the keyboard. I'm often frustrated in Windows Explorer just trying to move around directories.
I found this menu but missed the "default view" button, thanks!
It still boggles my mind that "non aligned on the grid" is the default though. It's a mess.
This infuriates me every time. This should be the default for the desktop (maybe) and absolutely no where else.
It's amazing how far Emacs has penetrated UI design.
(Sure, under the hood nothing different happens at the beginning, but semantically I think Windows makes sense here)
That is the universal way copy/cut&paste work, everywhere outside the Mac Finder.
CMD+C then CMD+ALT+V
I think of it not as copy-paste vs cut-paste but mark-copy vs mark-move.
It makes it consistent with drag and drop where alt is the modifier for copy vs move (the default depending on whether it's same disk vs another one)
Cmd-opt-V will move the previously copied folder/file. I find this behavior superior to having to decide whether to cut/copy a file to select it. Instead, you choose the operation when it is time to actually move or copy. You can also copy a file to multiple locations in combination with a move.
Cmd-up moves to the parent folder.
You have lots of sort and aligning options that are accessible in keyboard shortcuts. Column browser doesn’t have a good windows equivalent for example. Alt or double clicking the bottom bar adjusts the width of all panes or auto adjusts the selected one. So I’m never in a situation where some file name is cut off even in very deep hierarchies.
- There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned Need more info here, but I dont notice a problem with sorting by name type modified or any other column header just like windows explorer?
I use a nice little app called New File Menu to do that. It supports a bunch of defaults & whatever other templates you want to create. $2 on the Mac App Store. I’m just a happy user.
App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/new-file-menu/id1064959555?ls=...
Website: https://langui.net/new-file-menu/
Depends on what you mean by easy. There's 2 (two) things you need to do to make this easier:
1. Enable New Terminal Tab at Folder service in Finder (goto Finder/Services/Services Preferences.../Files and Folders).
2. Make sure the Path Bar is visible in Finder (it's on the View Menu)
Now right-click the path in the Path Bar where you want to create the folder, select and click the New Terminal Tab at Folder and then touch whatever empty file you want created. Close the terminal window/tab.
Done!
I rarely need to create a new, empty file - but when I do this is how I do it!
Create it for what? To use to launch the app that handles it? Just open the respective app and save an empty or unedited file.
>- There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work)
Copy as regularly (Cmd-C), and use Option-Cmd-V to move the file where you want to.
>- There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned
Not sure what you mean.
>- Tags are useless and just take up space for nothing
They're useful if you use them. Many people do use them. What exactly would you do with that "space" anyway? It's not like they take space in your apartment. It's a UI element which you can use or not use.
>- No "parent folder"...
Cmd+up arrow or Go -> Enclosing Folder.
Looks like all of the complains are basically "they're not where they was on Windows".
>or don't follow a consistent convention and have to be done some other way.
The follow macOS conventions, not Windows conventions.
This goes both ways. There have been whiny posts by Mac users who go to Windows (or from iOS to Android) and then gripe and complain about everything that isn't what they're accustomed to. It's just as silly.
Well... yeah kinda but not only. Windows does some things better, and it seems like a good idea to copy good UX paradigms wherever they come from. Also for some of these your answere is "why do you want to do this?" or "use some obscure keyboard magic". I want to because I want to. Sometimes I'm in a folder and want to create a specific file because it fits my current workflow. I don't always do it, but sometimes I need to.
>Copy as regularly (Cmd-C), and use Option-Cmd-V to move the file where you want to.
I don't care, why is it not Cmd-X? Why do they break the universal standard with this?
Because there's no "universal standard". There's mac (which did UI/folders/etc before Windows), Windows, and there's X and modern Linux desktops which came late to the game and (especially traditional X) didn't have any consistent way to do this (or even oferred it).
(or as others have already said, Command-UpArrow to open the parent folder)
You don't need cut for files, you either want to duplicate the file or move it. For moving you copy it (cmd-c) and then move with cmd-opt-v.
Cut doesn't really make sense for files. With text you cut out the text into a clipboard. Where does the file go when you cut it? Nowhere. There is no place where you can see that you had already cut a file but it's waiting for you to make a mistake and move it somewhere by accident.
Mac has a better duplicate/move UX paradigm and more appropriate for files & folders.
Even with a right click after copying a file, there's no "Move" option. Your explanation makes sense but doesn't really seem supported with Finder's UX since the "Move" terminology doesn't exist anywhere
> How does one discover Cmd-Opt-V?
Keyboard shortcuts are not usually meant to be "discovered" (how do you discover ctrl+x?). You can learn and memorize them. Although, there is a common theme with the option/alt modifier on the mac.
Of course they are, don't be silly. Even in Finder, the "Édition" menu (I don't know how it's called in english) lists the keyboard shortcuts next to their names (copy, paste...). When you don't select anything, it even shows "Cut (Cmd+X)" grayed out! It just disappears when yous elect a file/folder
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/keyboard-shortcuts...
Seems pretty similar to apple, you have to know that pressing Alt shows additional information.
Navigating to the parent folder isn’t exclusive to a keyboard shortcut (⌘↑). It’s also accessible from the menu bar (Go → Enclosing Folder).
In regards to consistency, though I know this isn't exactly what you meant, I just booted a virtual machine with System 6 (released in 1988) and Command-Up was the same key command to open the parent folder. :)
And yes you can cut. Cmd-C, Cmd-Opt-V.
And yes, you can sort and align. Just go to the View menu.
And yes, there's a way to go the parent folder. SEVERAL:
- Go -> Enclosing Folder
- Cmd-Up
- Right click on the window title and choose any enclosing folder from the tree
- Show the Path Bar and double click any enclosing folder from the tree
I don't think you've ever actually used a Mac.
For the last 2 years I've used a Mac professionally and personally. I switched from Windows because lots of things are better. Finder is not one of them. And your answers should give you a hint why it sucks.
An empty file is a file that is empty, with the name and extension I chose on the moment I need it.
>And yes you can cut. Cmd-C, Cmd-Opt-V.
With the wrong keyboard shortcut, the correct one universally being Cmd-X.
>And yes, there's a way to go the parent folder. SEVERAL: > >- Go -> Enclosing Folder > >- Cmd-Up > >- Right click on the window title and choose any enclosing folder from the tree > >- Show the Path Bar and double click any enclosing folder from the tree
Several ways, none being the correct one. Nice. I know Apple likes hard to discover shortcuts but this is ridiculous.
In Windows, it's Copy or Cut -> Paste. I don't mind this change from Windows. Actually, I slightly prefer the Mac version, because I can change my mind on what operation I want to do. Windows front loads the choice, and I have to do it again if I decide I don't want to copy or cut anymore.
As for folder nav/manipulation, I find Finder to make much greater sense, whereas Explorer was just, this makes sense because it's always been this way (don't get me wrong, Finder has its shortcomings in other areas, although File Preview [space bar] is pretty awesome).
Finder: Generally speaking, arrows do everything.
* Movement within folder: up/down arrow keys
* Move out or into a directory / into a file or app AKA open it: cmd up/down
* Expand/contract a folder: left/right arrow keys
* Rename a file/folder: Enter
Explorer:
* Movement within a folder: up/down arrow keys
* Move into a directory / open a file: Enter
* Move out of a directory: alt up
* Expand/contract a folder: left/right
* Rename a file / folder: F2
That's not just Windows, it is the way the copy/paste model works absolutely everywhere outside Mac's Finder. And there is a clear reason why it makes sense, and why the Finder way is just bad UX: the decision about what happens in location X should always be done when you are in location X.
So, if you navigate into a folder and select a file that you want somewhere else, you are currently in the best position to decide whether you want the file to stay here as well (copy) or no (cut). Then, you can go somewhere else and just add the file in that location (paste). Furthermore, on Windows you can paste the file to several places, with predictable semantics: the file will be copied to each of those places (though performance of this operation may be suprising).
I can't even begin to imagine on Mac if you copy a file the Cmd+opt+v it to multiple places. Does it move it around, deleting it from the previous place where you pressed cmd-opt-v???
Edit: I was entirely wrong about the part about copying to multiple places, which does undermine my point considerably.
Hmm, the first part isn't convincing. To me that sounds like "everyone else is doing it" and not much different than arguing between left side vs right side driving, when there could be a third way, like teleportation. Not saying Finder is quite that much of a shift, but Finder's method does have semantical differences, and not just "hey we're cmd+n/m for cut/copy".
As for the second part, I think that's an intriguing argument, but "bad UX" seems like a stretch. If it were truly always decided in location X, would you have to return to location X to cancel your copy/cut? No, because that would be far too strict. It also depends on what your mental model is of what has been decided at location X.
On macOS: I have decided I want to manipulate the data in this file at location X. I can decide to copy or move it later at location Y.
On Windows: I have decided I want to cut XOR copy this file at location X. I can decide location Y later.
I personally like the ability to chain my decisions after. Based on your edit, I guess you've already discovered, but yes on macOS, you can issue a copy command once, then duplicate it and/or move it as many times as you want, to multiple places, even if you choose a move command first. Only location X's copy is altered if doing a move.
I'm not even sure if that would be possible on Windows without going back and forth between location X and Y to switch between copy and cut (my wintel machine is down at the moment).
3 years of using a Mac now, I would never have figured this out on my own.
IMHO stupid to put the most common operation on a file behind a meta key.
The ratio of how often I rename a file (rarely) vs use a file (often) doesn't come out in favor of this choice.
That said I realize the decision was probably made long long ago and now Apple is just stuck with it.
Still though.
Maybe after another few years I'll figure out the hot key to change between the side pane and the main file list.
(yes I could just look it up, but I do most of my work in terminal and I try to avoid Finder as much as I can, I really dislike using it)
I think there's no right or wrongs in keyboard shortcuts, but there are traditions. Both Windows and macOS has their distinct histories and traditions with inspirations from each other. I think it's equally wrong to point a finger to a Windows machine and shout "Why you don't have a command key, you inferior OS-Wannabe?"
Some machines work different from each other. Sun and other Unixen had super, hyper and meta layers on their keyboards with hundreds or more shortcuts. They weren't wrong either, just different, and IMHO cool.
> Several ways, none being the correct one...
Again, if we're going to throw stones, I can name a lot of shortcomings in Windows from file names to other small/backward stuff, but it'd be equally wrong. They are just different systems and have different choices.
> I know Apple likes hard to discover shortcuts but this is ridiculous.
Just open the help menu of an app and write to command you want to find. It'll show it on the menu. Pressing enter will directly run that action.
Well actually I think the control/option/command paradigm makes more sense than ctrl/alt/super, so yeah, I'd love this being copied by Microsoft. It's harder than just supporting Cmd-X in the Finder though. Adding Cmd-X to Finder is just a net gain, it doesn't even require deprecating or breaking anything. It just brings a standard to an app that should support it.
I think no matter what you do here, you have a problem. When you press ctrl-x on a file in Windows explorer; you're not really cutting it; nothing happens til you paste! (Unlike using cut anywhere else).
Both Windows and MacOS end up with a bit of a strained metaphor here; I don't think it's at all obvious which way is _correct_.
From a UX perspective the answer is pretty clear. Copy/Cut/Paste is the winning paradigm, which empirically makes it the correct way.
Someone who had never used Windows might reasonably expect, on finding 'cutting' a file did something, that if they never pasted the file would just be deleted, because that's how cut and past normally works.
Furthermore, you can cut once and paste to several places, with predictable semantics identical to every other implementation of cut+paste (though performance of the first paste will be different from subsequent ones).
Edit: I was entirely wrong about the second part, which does undermine my point considerably.
And what is the "correct" way to go up a folder? What would be easier or more discoverable than Go -> Enclosing Folder?
I use all three major desktop OSes regularly now, and overall Windows just feels like the most user-friendly and straightforward, though of course it too has issues (e.g. various settings/control panel options being randomly split between new style and old style systems).
Oh, and Linux seems to be by far the least stable. I have apps freezing the whole damn computer way more often there than the other two.
I'm not sure Windows is such a great example in the conversation about file systems, what with its "collections" and abstract hierarchy which is sometimes upside down and somewhat – but not fully! – circular.
Open an explorer window, click on your name under "quick access". You're in the home directory. You also have a "Desktop" folder there. Go in there. You see your desktop files. So far so good.
Now go back to your user folder and click "up". You're now in "desktop". What?! Only now, there's other stuff in there. How many desktops are there?!
Now go back to your user folder, choose any folder. Click on the address bar. C:\users\your_name\your_folder. Click twice "up", you expect to be in C:\users, right? Ha!
Now type C:\users\your_name\your_folder, or browse through the C:\ in the left pane. Click the address bar and compare with earlier. Now click up. Very intuitive. Depending on how you got somewhere, your apparent hierarchy is not the same.
Back to the "quick collection" thing, there's a desktop entry there. Click it. Looks like the first desktop folder, so no surprise here, right?. Click up. You end up in "my computer"!
Now, do the same operations in Finder. How many different desktops are there? Not sure how Windows is more logical or user-friendly.
I side with the other poster who said that most "common users" just don't understand file systems, and so they put everything on the desktop because it doesn't go away.
This is really helpful to know - it's one of my biggest bugaboos about using Finder & navigating the Mac GUI.
On the other hand, I suspect this kind of obscure key-based shortcut is a big part of why Macs don't feel intuitive to a lot of users. How could I have known this shortcut exists? It's not broadcast anywhere obvious. My options for finding all these obscure shortcuts aren't great. I could scroll through a submenu in the Settings pane, hoping to find something that looks like it says the thing I'm trying to do (and then that I can figure out what keys it means, since Apple key symbology is VERY arcane). I could stumble across a mention of the shortcut in a forum like this. Or I could Google in the hope of finding something - though that assumes I believe it's doable in the first place, which I didn't in this particular case.
It would also help if Apple chose easier / more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. A "shortcut" which both is the only way to do something, and also requires pressing a minimum of four seemingly-random keys, is not a shortcut at all - it's a mental load on the user that they just have to hold in their heads forever.
Shortcuts mostly appear in the menus, but I remember one in particular being elusive: cmd + down. I've found it out by asking a friend.
I think there is supposed to be a method to the madness, though it's maybe less and less clear nowadays, especially with applications that don't implement them correctly (such as MS Office, electron apps, etc) and people being very used to Windows' conventions.
For example, the modifier keys' names are usually an indication of what you can achieve with them.
CMD (the "flower-like" key, directly next to the space bar) is usually the one used to produce... commands. As in Copy, Save, etc.
Then you have your ALTernative / Option, which usually modifies some other key's usual behaviour. You can obtain dead keys with it. ALT+e / e = é. etc. It also works in menus to obtain alternative actions. You can click a menu, press alt, and see the entries change.
And CTRL deals with control characters. ctrl-c in the terminal, line editing (ctrl-a in any text field goes to the beginning of the line, etc). It's not clear to me why right click is obtained with control and not alt, though...
That is insane. Who came up with that? Why do some entries lose their ellipsis when you hold alt? How is anyone expected to know any of this?
At least, on macOS, if you press OPT, the entries will change. On Windows, if you click right → delete, the file isn't deleted. It's moved to the recycle bin. "How are you supposed to know that?". On Mac, it says "move to trash" or similar. Now say you don't want that. If you hold Shift and click delete, it actually deletes it. But if you hold Shift while looking at the Windows menu, it still says "delete".
There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too. They each come with a mental model which may be closer or further from the user's.
I think the issues we see nowadays come up because many apps work the same everywhere, and people may switch between systems more often, so figure since <app> works the same, everything works the same.
It's also hard to think that what comes naturally is actually a mental model that's been ingrained and not something "absolute".
I guess this is why computers used to have manuals, but who reads those anymore?
You're not. Shortcuts are a power user thing. If you want to move the window you drag it.
> There are quite a lot of "have to know" things in other OSs, too.
Oh definitely. It just seems to me that OSX is exceptionally bad at telegraphing these things. On windows and even linux most all features have something visible to clue you in to their existence. OSX seems to do its best to hide things instead.
Relatedly, IMO iOS took a huge step backwards in UX when iOS7 moved away from a highly spatial interaction metaphor for practically the entire OS—by which I don't mean the skeuomorphism, exactly, but things like folders sliding the screen "open" when tapped, so that they had a sense of physical location within the main screen. Or "slide to unlock" looking like a physical slider so you didn't even need to read it to know what to do. The loss of the security blanket that was the physical (or at least faux-physical) home button has hurt it, too.
It also only worked well when you only had a few files in any folder. If you have 100 files that are related in one folder and you can't find anything without sorting it alphabetically. Depending on how your brain organizes things this might not matter.
Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.
The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.
Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.
> Where's file X for project A?
> On the floppy disk for project A.
And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:
> Where's file X for project A?
> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".
Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.
It's basically hidden entirely in iOS, probably for this reason.
I have left firefox overnight and had a tab decide it would like to eat all my memory.
Linux does have an oom killer to deal with out of memory situations but it will kick in halfway to the heat death of the universe and you will reboot first.
Oom looks just like a crash the UI is frozen however if the offender is killed everything actually is working.
The solution is a userspace oom daemon like earlyoom that kicks in before you actually run entirely out of memory and knows not to kill things like X.
Distributions ought to ship with it.
It's careful attention to detail like this that keeps Linux relevant for the next generation!
(I'm kidding, of course. I was recently trying to reproduce some Node test flakiness that only happened on CI, which has limited resources and exposes timing sensitivity. I had trouble getting this to happen on my 32 core workstation, so I decided to run 100 copies of the tests in parallel which definitely reproduced the issue -- and ran the machine out of memory. The OOM killer kicked in, and chose to kill all the extra Node processes without killing my SSH session, which was nice of it.)
Yeah, I wonder why this happens. I've seen LKML emails trying to address this problem, they even cited Firefox as an example:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/4/15
This also seems to be the norm in user space software. I've read a lot of source code where people simply assume malloc never fails. Tried to discuss this on freenode once, apparently nobody knows what to do in case the system is out of memory. Why can't it gracefully degrade?
You mean install it by default? Even good old Debian stable ships with earlyoom (which I'm ofc using, since I saw it mentioned here once on HN).
It sounds odd to me to describe applications relying on a toolkit like QT/GTK which can run in dozens of different environments which in turn run on both X11 and Wayland which in turn can talk to a variety of different GPU drivers as tightly coupled.
I understand the reasoning for protecting the end user, but like UAC in Windows, or Developer Mode options in Android, you should be able to disable these protections. If I want to run a binary, I want to run that binary.
You can also unhide hidden dot folders as well if you wish but by default those are hidden. I don't have the instructions for that right now but a google search can find it for you if you want it.
I suppose it's an attempt to conceal/abstract away the underlying file system structure, which probably makes sense if those folders are already on the sidebar.
You should be able to use cmd+shift+h to always jump to the home directory in finder. I remember having the same real annoyance until I discovered the hotkey.
I go back to Windows occasionally and I still hate every single thing about it. The tiles, the file system, the telemetry, the intrusive updates that guarantee I'll have to wait for an undefined time before I can get some work done, the driver lottery (still...) And many more.
MacOS is more of a workable OS with some really stupid warts. They should have been fixed years ago, but they probably won't be, ever.
Finder is particularly bad, and has needed a complete overhaul for at least a decade.
But Apple's other apps are heading in an MS-ish direction - which is more controlling and constraining, and less intuitive and transparent. It really shouldn't be as hard as it is to export photos from Photos, and the screen grabber should just allow saving to any file location instead of getting in the way with some random-ish defaults, one of which can be customised, if only you remember you need to.
This all reeks of second-rate middle management - untalented PMs trying to justify their existence with poorly-designed updates while more serious issues go unaddressed.
Apple are a weird company. When they're in the zone they can hit it out of the park, like with the M1. But - ironically - desktop UI design is not the model it could be. If MacOS 11 ever happens (not holding my breath...) it would be just as likely to be a step backwards as forwards.
This is a common criticism but it's entirely false. Windows offers a lot more way to delay or refuse updates than macOS. When macOS wants to update, the best you can do is "Ask again tomorrow". And pray you see the popup before it reboots in 60 seconds.
But, I still haven't figured out how to delay Windows updates (granted I haven't looked into it seriously yet since I only use it for casual gaming).
The point is, the default UI allows users to delay they update on MacOS easily, while Windows does not.
macOS just nags you everyday.
1) Edit the toolbar and add "Path" dropdown
2) View menu -> Show path bar
3) Cmd + up/down arrows to navigate up and down the path hierarchy
But of course, when talking about how intuitive Macs are, having all that hidden by default doesn't exactly make it easy to understand where you are in the filesystem. It feels a bit like the Mac side of their desire to just not have a user visible filesystem on the iPad, which thankfully they've given up on it because shooting documents back and forth between apps via Share buttons was terrible.
Kind of ironic considering all the research Apple did that led to the spatial finder.
How often is that? What hardware do you run it on? What distro do you use?
Two different Ryzen APU based computers I've built running whatever Ubuntu happened to be the latest. Tried both KDE and XFCE and they freeze about 1-2 times a week. The computers haven't crashed and if you ssh in everything seems to be running fine, but mouse/keyboard/screen are completely frozen. One computer dual boots Windows and I can run Windows for a month on it without rebooting and it never misses a beat.
Its more stable than it used to be, but the desktop manager still keeps hanging every fortnight or so. Changing the brightness, right after unlocking my laptop is a recipe for getting frustrated, and eventually having to hard restart the computer. Other micro issues pop up every now and then.
The problem with these features is that people have varying needs and don’t understand or respect what they are! Filing is a great example, everyone keeps files, but most people have no organization. That’s why once upon a time companies hired people to file things. It’s also why Apple tried to kill the file metaphor for iOS.
MacOS has the wacky finder UI, but the search is best in class and once people discover it, they just go away and do their thing.
Cmd-click on the folder in the Finder window title, and go up as far as you want?
And any time there is a complaint, the community is like "Oh, dummy, just do this thing that is not obvious at all, how could you not figure that out?"
You can say that again. I never had to interact with a Mac in my life (Macs weren't popular in Eastern Europe so I grew up with Windows and Linux) and later in life at one job interview, the tech lead gave me his Macbook and told me to code a sorting function in JS and stepped out for 10 minutes. Within that time, I accidentally performed some swipe gesture on the trackpad which hid my code editor away with me unable to find it as I had no visible taskbar and all I had visible was a Chrome window so I started googling how to get my code window back. When the tech lead came back I apologized and told him I couldn't finish the task since I hid the code editor by accident and had to google how to use the OS.
I'm biased here of course, but IMHO for someone new to the OS, MacOS UX discoverability is worse than Windows or major Linux DEs.
I've annoyed a couple of people by disabling all their hot corners when I've used their Macs lol.
That or explain the arrow-key centric keyboard navigation, which has fewer exceptions than Explorer.
But there are plenty of shortcuts on Windows that are the way they are for historical reasons, not because of user-centric design.
It's not obvious in the slightest. No affordance indication, no tooltip, no flashing indicator or walkthrough demonstration when you get a new Mac, nothing happens if you hover over it or click it, no real reason to think there'd be extra functionality in an unadorned window title, etc.
I like the hardware and I like the advantages of a *nix OS for dev stuff (compared to Windows - at least pre-WSL), but the only thing MacOS has going for it is looking graphically decent and having decent performance (as far as I can tell). The actual UX is quite odd and arcane in many ways. Definitely not intuitive.
I'm not sure what you're doing wrong here - when I click the Finder icon it shows me the top Finder window, or opens a new one if there is no window. Is this not what it does for you?
macOS will do its thing when you click the dock icon and bring the window to the front, but it can be hard to notice because only a sliver of the window will actually be visible.
If you have many windows, it can be hard to notice (especially if you have many monitors).
Arguably, it's intuitive:
* If you know what you are doing, you can go to the menu bar or click on the icon again.
* If you don't know know what you are doing, the obvious action is to blame yourself and click the icon again, which does open a window (to the Recents folder). So it's gaslighting a little, but it is intuitive.
I'm not sure what you're talking about - you cannot quit Finder and the app is always open. You can only force restart it but it is never in a quit state for you to do what you're say you're doing, and if you do force-start it it behaves as already described.
And that was definitely a bug at one point. Whenever I encountered it years ago, I was always bemused thinking about how a typical user would ever figure out how to open Finder and get to their files. No matter how many times you clicked the dock icon, the window would never appear. Of course, I know to use Cmd+N; and nowadays, a new Finder window opens as expected when clicked.
One of my favorites just happened yesterday with finder - I was trying to figure out how to rename a file, well the usual fx keys aren't doing it so the common process was to go to the toolbar context menu where hotkey is indicated next to the action's text. Rename for some reason had no hotkey indication! [1] so naturally I'm thinking it's somehow not bounded, google around for hotkey editing etc just to findout it's the least obvious key: return.
When you say the 'usual' function keys... do you really mean some other system's function keys? Why would you expect macOS to use the same function keys as a different system? There's no standards body for these things.
Yes there is -- it's called CUA (Common User Access)
"The subset of CUA implemented in Microsoft Windows or OSF/Motif is generally considered a de facto standard to be followed by any new Unix GUI environment."
Apparently[1] the original intent was to allow the user to just type and rename the file, but the enter key was quickly added after they noticed that the display models all had garbage filenames. It was an early tweak that stuck (much to the chagrin of those of us who also use other systems). Why they never added it to the context menu is beyond me.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
But I would argue F2 is less obvious. It's only obvious if you learned it at some point or if you were there when F2 was chosen. Enter is at least a normal text editing key for day to day typing, and it's already the bookend key to finish typing a new name.
My head-cannon about this is that for consistency within macos, all actions must be cmd+something, so is cmd+O for opening a file. In the terminal you can also use the "open" command which opens the file or the directory (I use "open ." a lot, I find faster navigating in the shell that in the finder).
Which is why I always try Cmd+R for renaming a file and then nothing happens.
Now I've used windows for a decade, and I still overall dislike it. But that doesn't mean these things are done "wrong" they are just done differently and not how I'd expect.
Windows doesn't place the light switches where I'm accustomed to. For example hy are there so many menus bars on each window. It's simpler to always know where the menu is at the top and it creates less screen clutter. Why does windows quit a program when close the document. If I wanted to quit it, I would have quit it. I just wanted a new document. These are just a few of the things that aren't bad but just aren't the philosophy I'd come to expect. Control-alt-delete to log in? Why?! I can't hit that one handed easily! Good thing I have two hands. And yeah bash or shell is kinda mess, but powershell is a verbose and has bureaucratic feel. It's just not my cup of tea but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
For example: an experienced user is more likely to notice that closing a window in macOS backgrounds the app, and more likely to figure out how to fully exit the app process completely (either via Cmd+Q or menu>Quit). Given that, an experienced user is less likely to grow accustomed to all of their apps being in a backgrounded state, and find Finders forced background state unusual/exceptional.
In contrast, an inexperienced computer user will likely leave all apps they use open all the time (possibly not realising they're running) and as such grow more quickly accustomed to having to Option+N for everything (not just Finder).
There's a lot of such examples in macOS.
I'd say both behaviours could be equally surprising to any user, regardless of their previous OS biases but either way that's not really related to the point I was making.
I was just saying that an inexperienced user will notice technical details less (e.g. the ramifications of processes continuing to run in the background without windows, the dock status indicators showing they're still open, the fact they show up in the app switcher, etc.) and as such won't be inclined to "take control" of that default behaviour in a way that an experienced user might, due to their heightened awareness of it.
macOS has those also, programs can live on the menu bar.
But in macOS, closing the last window basically never exits the program. Even for a program like Element, which is just an Electron view, closing the window doesn't quit the program, even though what's left over is useless: there's no way to relaunch the Electron pane except to quit and start it again.
This is just how macOS works: if you want to quit, you type Cmd-Q, if you want to close windows, red button or Cmd-W, and closing windows won't quit your program.
There's plenty (an increasing number, IME) of Windows apps that work that way, but mostly if an app exists to facilitate some kind of user interaction via a UI and there's no worries open there's no reason for it to be open, so no windows = closed app is a fairly same convention.
> Even for a program like Element, which is just an Electron view, closing the window doesn't quit the program, even though what's left over is useless:
I think that last part pretty well illustrates why “closing all windows is not closing the app”, while it make sense in many cases, is not a great model to be applied inflexibly.
I mentioned that Element is just an Electron view because it doesn't behave like a native Mac app. The correct thing to do is to offer a menu item which would bring the view back.
VLC is a good example of an app which works correctly in this way. There's only the one window, which shows either the playlist or the video. If you close it, VLC stays open, and there's a menu item which will bring it back.
Of course VLC can also open files, so Cmd-O is useful here, and Element doesn't happen to support more than one window... because it's a browser view dressed as a Mac app. If it were native, it would be a no-brainer to support multiple windows, each with a given user account.
So yes, there are some edge cases where an application offers exactly one window, and there's no reason to close that window instead of closing the app. But the Mac-native thing to do is to offer a menu item to bring that window back, instead of breaking consistency by having that program just disappear on you when you close the window.
If you open up QuickTime Player and then play back a video, then close the video, as soon as you background the app, it auto-quits itself. I wonder if they made it behave this way at some point to get around a memory leak. It's such an unexpected thing and it infuriates me each time I encounter it.
There are two kinds of novice users:
* Leave all apps and windows open forever * Close everything as soon as context switches, avoiding with multitasking.
You can also blend the two, but closing all windows you leave, but leave open forever when the system forces a switch.
> grow more quickly accustomed to having to Option+N
Novice users don't know what Option+N is. The Mac was always designed to be used without hotkeys.
This was my point. I don't think "Leave all windows open forever" is specifically a type of novice user: I've met expert users who do this. But I was rather focused on the "Leave all macOS apps open forever" not because they're content with apps being open, but simply because it's non-obvious that the apps are running.
e.g. my mother is a "close everything" user: she even manually logs out of all online sessions immediately whenever she's finished with that tab (often entering credentials again many times in a browsing session if she needs to return to a site). She really can't stand having multiple things active simultaneously. She leaves all apps running (windowlessly) all the time on macOS. She would not be happy if I told her they were still running in the background.
I'm re-reading my own comment as both replies to it seem to have taken the opposite point that I intended, but I can't see where I said the macOS behaviour is bad. I personally like it (though I wasn't saying that either).
My only point was that it being less intuitive for more techy users doesn't mean it's not generally very intuitive for the majority.
That's convergent evolution. The UIs started off very different. MacOS's current set of UI abstractions was mostly enshrined in an era when its competitor was Windows 3.1.
> Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens?
I was going to give a few justifications for this, but I just tested it, and clicking on the Finder icon in the Dock does open a new Finder window for me. (In Big Sur. This definitely wasn't always the case; I'm not certain when it changed.)
But those justifications, for the long period where it didn't, are still kind of interesting/relevant:
1. the Desktop is a Finder window. IIRC, on some versions of macOS, using a switcher to focus the Finder would — if you don't have any open Finder windows — focus the desktop (insofar as keyboard navigation goes.)
2. You can do useful things with the Finder without any windows open. IIRC, Apple's HIG only recommends creating a new window in response to a click on the app's icon (and or having a Cmd-0 accelerator), if the app is useless without having a window open. But the Finder has a bunch of menu-items in the "Go" menu (with keyboard accelerators) to open windows showing specific locations, or to open dialogs for connecting to networks, etc. It'd be annoying if you wanted to open one of these, but focusing the Finder always opened a default window you had to get rid of first. I personally often focus the Finder and then press Cmd+K to mount an SMB share on my NAS, then immediately close the resulting window, because the point was to get it mounted for command-line use.
I agree that there's a lot of counter intuitive if not worse UI ideas.
But it's surrounded by tons of superb tricks. Remember the live document preview years ago ?
Also the GUI guidelines made the system visually more appealing.
The compositor is also weird, I cannot really explain but when I use a Mac I don't see layers.. I don't feel like i'm clicking on a button, then an event is sent, then some logic occurs.. maybe it's only subjective bias (can't be 100%) but it feels more direct. Maybe they tailored the graphical subsystem / compositor to ensure extremely low latency I can't say.. but, even after using countless machines and countless desktop environments.. the first time I used a mac I felt something very different. Not better .. but deeply different.
It's a holdover from two different earlier eras.
First, you have everything up to about 1998, which covers MacOS Classic through Mac OS 8, and Windows up through Win98. At the beginning of this period, when "PC" meant MS-DOS, the usability difference was obviously stark. But even in GUI era of PCs, System 7 compared favorably with Windows 3.1, and Mac OS 8 compared favorably with Windows 95.
Then Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 came out, and I'd say that things at least evened up. All else being equal, OS 9's GUI was still simpler and more intuitive, to my taste, but all else was not equal. Windows 9x had memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking, and Mac OS Classic didn't, and there were issues with system extensions and stability in Mac OS that I personally felt were more troublesome than Windows's famous BSOD problem during that era. This opinion could be a product of my experience working tech support at the time. BSOD was usually fixed by cursing profusely while rebooting. System extension conflicts were fixed at great physical and emotional cost to the person doing the fixing.
So I'd say Windows was generally easier to use than Macs for a while, until OS X eventually came into its own. It's harder to place a start time on this, but let's say 2002ish, with the release of Jaguar. And then there's been a sort of long slow decline as they clutter up the GUI, while at the same time Microsoft was putting serious work into cleaning things up. I'm not sure if the switch happened during the Windows 7 era or the Windows 10 era, but yeah, I'd definitely say I find Windows easier to use nowadays.
Personally, the main thing keeping me on Macs nowadays is frankly just the touchpad, to which I seem to be addicted.
Whether renaming as “enter” is a good shortcut or not, I think the navigation ones are perfectly reasonable in that if you learn one of them, it’s opposite is easily guessed.
After using both for a long time (Windows for 30 years (!) and Mac OS for 16), I actually like the Mac OS way a bit better. In my usage renaming is a very common operation and I don't have F keys on my usual keyboard (renaming in Windows is F2).
But what I mean is that Finder navigating uses an unintuitive key chord you have to learn, while renaming uses a single key, and a large and very common/obvious/intuitive one. This does in fact mean the UX is declaring which one they expect to be more common. I'm not saying renaming is uncommon, but for me it's nowhere near the usage of navigating into a folder. Are you saying you're renaming folders more often than browsing into them? (How do you get to the folder you want to rename?)
Both Windows and Linux GUI folder browsers use the Enter key to navigate, and so do many other tree browser UIs including our web browsers. It's very common and very reasonable to expect Enter to navigate to the thing you've selected. This expectation and ecosystem of navigating this way means that Mac's Finder stands out as different and unintuitive, even within a Mac-only set of applications. I love my Mac, and I've also used both Windows and Mac since they first existed ... both for 35 years. But today's Finder is definitely weird and anachronistic compared nearly all other modern file browsers.
Because you're always in an app in macOS, Cmd+O is the more consistent choice: every app you're in will use Cmd+O for "open." In Finder, what you're opening is apps or files, so it works.
Return for rename makes sense in a more subtle way.
Besides opening a file, there are two "main" actions you'll use in Finder: renaming files, and quick-playing files. In a dialogue box, you'll either use Return or Spacebar (the former for triggering the highlighted button, the latter for another button you highlight with the Tab key).
Consider again the consistency-across-apps argument. "Rename" isn't a super common command in all kinds of apps (a DAW will allow you to rename tracks, but that idea doesn't really apply to a text editor or IDE), so using Cmd+R in Finder for "rename" isn't necessarily great for consistency, considering that apps in general will almost surely bind something to Cmd+R ("run" or something like that).
Due to the aforementioned dialogue box pattern, Spacebar or Return are the obvious choices for rename, simply by virtue of being used so much.
Spacebar technically makes more sense because quick-play is adjacent to opening a file, but the ergonomics of "Spacebar = play" across so much media makes it the obvious choice for that. So, Return it is.
I’ve used macOS for 16 years, hitting enter/return still feels weird.
Return is a holdover from typewriters. It means "return the carriage to the left margin". I'm surprised the Mac keyboard doesn't say "Enter". It seems like a much more accurate word to describe what the button does.
Yes, "Return" applies in the context of editing text (return the cursor to left margin) but not in any other context on a computer I can think of.
I wonder why they continue to label it return and not enter.
/end random musing
edit: Downthread, someone provided a link to a StackOverflow page explaining how MacOS treats enter and return differently in some rare instances (it's program specific).
cut. There does not seem to be a way to cut and paste a file/folder. The best I could figure out is to drag the icons, hold down the finger, and move the cursor to the desired folder on the sidebar (or another window) and release the finger. This is either extremely difficult to pull of, or I am less dexterous than I think I am.
Why not have cut as an option in the drop down menu? I really can't figure this one out. What UX mantra suggests this.
Also, dragging files around is also a difficult feat to overcome. You either press down too hard (end up opening all selected files in their target applications -- RIP ram, let's restart the computer), or too gently and nothing happens.
I remember this command was I implemented a few years back and I think it was to reduce chances of unpasted files from disappearing or something.
In fact, opening any menu and pressing option reveals many secondary functions.
If you right click to open the context menu, and press OPT, you'll even see the "paste item" option turn into "move item".
It's 100% the wrong way to do it. Maddeningly wrong. In a world where CTRL-X hadn't existed for decades, and Apple's way of doing it was the norm, if someone came along and "invented" CTRL-X for the cut command, it would be universally recognized as an improvement.
Pressing Cmd+C means I've "grabbed the file." Now I can decide what I want to do with it. I might want to just move it (cut/paste = opt+cmd+v), or I might want to copy it (copy/paste = cmd+v). But the fact is, I can change my mind mid-action.
Not cutting files is deliberate, I think. What should the OS do if you cut files, and then don't paste them and cut something else? Put them back, put them in the Trash?
A sibling comment pointed out that there's a magic incantation for "paste and delete", but clearly the Mac way to do it is drag and drop.
Which used to be dead easy, and now I'm lucky if I get it the first time.
> What should the OS do if you cut files, and then don't paste them and cut something else?
Windows, and common linux file managers leave the files in place in this scenario. Its not the most intuitive thing, but people (i think) understand this is what'll happen if you cut something and then cut something again.
> magic incantation
About that. I love how a combination of control, alt, command, function and tab keys can make you into a keyboard ninja but I also can't help but feel that it's a bit much. For the first few months after getting a mac, about 20-30% of my search engine queries were about these keyboard shortcuts. It's a steep slope. And the combinations often do something very fundamental that you often use tens of time a day. For instance, I was today years old when I realize that 'command+down' opens a file.
Of course, "Copy" does too, yet Mac allows that...
But I agree with you that it would be a good feature for Finder! Finder is missing a lot of useful stuff, it basically hasn't changed, and when it has it isn't for the better.
While we're dreaming, a great implementation of "grab" would be to have a differently-shaped window with just a doc handle and a close button on it, and the grabbed documents jump from the Finder window to the grab window. Then you can drag and drop the doc handle, or hit the "move grabbed items" hotkey, and the grabbed files/folders would jump into the new location. Or if you close the grab window they all jump back to where they were.
Grab window floats on top of everything else in Finder, so you can't lose track of it, and if you close it the files always go home, and you can only have one at a time.
that's one thing when it's copied text from some web page, but quite another when it's a file or folder.
I think this sentiment largely comes from the era when Microsoft Windows XP was the dominant Windows flavor and also the ME/Vista debacles.
The article isn’t wrong though, so things do seem a bit weird if you don’t know they work. MacOS is far from perfect, it is however much more consistent than Windows.
As to ease of use...
MacOS is not easier to learn - it has just as many quirks as windows, except in different places.
However, I have found it much more consistent than any other desktop. The menubar is one example - always there in the same place, with all the File, Edit, etc menus as expected. Keys are consistent (mostly)
consistency is the key.
2. Right-click on the folder name in a Finder window to see and go up the folder hierarchy.
3. Make sure Finder is active and go to the View menu and select Show Path Bar.
4. I'm not sure what you're talking about with Sort View here, but Windows works the same as macOS and on both platforms, you can have it both ways.
As a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user... I'll say that there are plenty of random broken things on the Mac, but there are also a few nice things that work very consistently on the Mac, but you'd never think to try them because you're used to them not working on Linux or Windows. So if you have been using Linux or Windows a long time, you will probably find macOS frustrating, just for the reason that it is different from what you are used to, and not because there are fundamental flaws with macOS or Windows.
Just an example of a couple simple things that are easy on a Mac, but hard on Linux/Windows: saving a file to a specific location. Let's say you have a Finder window open, and an unsaved document open in an application, and you want to save the open document to the folder that's open in the Finder.
1. You could go to the app and hit save, bringing up the save dialog, and then drag the folder (perhaps from the icon in the title bar) into the save dialog. This moves the save dialog to point to that folder.
2. You could save the file somewhere else, and drag the file (perhaps from the icon in the title bar) into the folder.
3. You could save the file on the desktop, and then move it into the desired folder.
I have not really ever figured out a nice way to do this on Windows. I often end up having to navigate through save dialogs on Linux and Windows and it seems unnecessary. Windows certainly doesn't let you move files that are open, which is a frustrating restriction when you run into it.
> Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens?
It brings Finder forward, and opens a new window if there are no Finder windows open, which is the same behavior as other Mac apps.
> Don't even get me started on the sort options. What kind of file manager applies a Sort view to every single directory, instead of the one you actually set the Sort view to?
Command J lets you set the view options, it's per-directory and includes sorting & grouping. Per-directory options don't do anything in column view. I'm not sure what you're doing, so I don't know what's missing. I switched to column view in the early 2000s and only occasionally switch to list view when I need to sort a massive folder by file sizes (which, unfortunately, requires command-J and checking "calculate all sizes", which is not something you'd know to look for).
In RiscOS, drag-n-drop saving was the norm. You were not presented with a dialog, just an icon you could drag wherever you wanted the file to go. To me, this seems like a much more logical way to work with the desktop folder/file metaphor.
I don't think drag and drop is the most intuitive, but it's way worse with Windows. I think there are at least four iterations of those Open/Save windows (dating to Windows 95).
A tool called Direct Folders [1] adds a recent menu that shows all open folders and revenge, making those windows slightly more usable
You can do this in Windows. Save the file, open the save dialog again, drag the file icon to the Explorer window with the folder you want open. Hold shift to toggle copy/move.
I could move the file, but this broke the association with the open document. I saved to ~/test.txt, then moved it to ~/Documents/test.txt, and saved a second time. The second time I saved it, it saved the file to ~/test.txt, which is incorrect and useless. Now I have two files, but no action I took as a user should have created two files--moving a file should not create a second copy, and saving an open file should not have created a second copy, so why should moving and saving create a second copy?
On Windows, you typically get an error message, because you can't move an open file. (Not all applications keep the file open, so this doesn't always happen.) Personally, I think that enforcing exclusive locks is the worst, most significant design flaw in the entire history of the Windows operating system.
Only on macOS do you get the nice, expected behavior... it does not matter if you move a file while it is open in an application. When a file is open in an application, the open file is associated with the file, not with the pathname. You can rename a file in the Finder or reorganize a bunch of files in the Finder (or do the same in the terminal) and it does not matter whether those files are open in any applications. You can reorganize files in the Finder, and then when you save open documents, they save to the new location, not the old one. If you rename files in the Finder or rename a bunch of files with a script in the terminal, the windows for open documents you renamed will update their titles to match the new names.
The problem here is that (opinion time) the standard filesystem API is a really terrible interface. What you want is some way to create durable references to files. File handles can do that, but only while your application is open. Paths can do it while your application is closed, but the reference is lost if you move the file. On macOS, there's a standard API which provides something more persistent than file handles and more durable than paths. I think they're called "bookmarks" now, but they used to be called "aliases".
1. I have a folder open in Gnome's "Files" app. I can't drag it into the dialog--there's nothing draggable. I could go up a level to the enclosing folder, drag the child folder into the save folder, and then go back down a level to the child folder... these extra steps seem a bit unnecessary. So it's doable, but clunky.
2. I saved a file in GEdit somewhere else. How do I move it? There is nothing to drag. On macOS, there is an icon in the title bar of the window (called the proxy icon) that can be dragged where you like.
3. I saved the file in GEdit on the desktop as ~/Desktop/file.txt, then moved it to ~/.../.../file.txt. Then I made some more changes in GEdit, and saved it again... now I have two files! GEdit was not aware that the file had moved, and when I saved it, it created a second copy of the file, which is unexpected and wrong.
If this is working for you, perhaps you could share the exact steps?
I think one of the problems here is that on Linux, there is no real way to drag an open object... you can only drag things out of containers, but you can't drag things without first opening the container. For example, you can't drag an open folder into a save window, you have to first open the parent folder. You also can't drag an open document into an open window, you have to open the parent folder. There's not even a clear way to do that--on macOS, you can command-click the name in the title bar of the window and select the parent folder from the drop-down... not saying this is intuitive, but it does work which is a massive step up from not working at all.
With 2 and 3 - yes you're right I didn't realise that was how it worked on macos! Those are both interesting features I haven't seen elsewhere. Although I think 3 would be possible to implement say in gedit, as the inode of the file you save shouldn't change when you move it in the file manager, everything in Linux is usually path-based so this might be kind of unexpected.
You could implement this yourself on Linux, for sure, but it's been around on macOS since System 7 appeared in 1991 and everything uses it.
Whoever sets the standard behavior of such an important operation as destructive seriously knows nothing about UI.
IMHO, it's mainly holdover from when Windows was DOS. For a very long time using a Mac was kind of like a religion (they even had explicit evangelists), and many people who used Macs were irrationally attached to the platform. One of the main tenets of the faith was that Macs were much easier to use than PCs (because GUI and no autoexec.bat and IRQ assignment, etc). I think that meme has gotten stuck in popular consciousness, even though Windows has had literally 30+ years to catch up. Also, especially since the OS X era, I think the usability of Macs has stagnated or even regressed in many ways.
It might simply be the fact that I've never used a mac as a primary device. But, clicks, navigating the explorer and settings menus seem to be a lot simpler on windows. It also seems to be almost malicious in punishing you for using something that isn't a 1st party application.
The only other time a software has made me feel so incompetent is shitty TV UIs and Snapchat.
I can see why it is loved by people deeply invested in the walled garden and programmers who get a happy marriage of Linux and mature consumer OS. But, I would find it hard to recommend a macbook to someone who didn't lie in those 2 camps.
Unbelievable how devs put up with this.
I used Mac OS 7 and 8 extensively back in the day, and despite some UI similarities it was a totally different experience from Windows machines. The computers had totally different ports (parallel and ps/2 vs proprietary mac connectors), and a different set of software (Clarisworks vs Word Perfect). There were even developers who made games just for Macs like Ambrosia Software.
Nowadays, you can basically use the same software (Chrome, Slack, VSCode, Steam) on Windows, Mac, or Linux. And can share a USB-C hub between a Macbook and a Dell.
Clicking Finder will open a new Finder window if none was created thus far, or bring up a minimized window.
>Don't even get me started on the sort options. What kind of file manager applies a Sort view to every single directory, instead of the one you actually set the Sort view to?
Not sure what you mean. If I click to select a sort view, it's applied to the directory I'm looking at.
Microsoft needs to stop fucking with working UIs. Metro (or whatever they call it now) is a worthless eyesore full of ads and distracting rotating, flipping, bouncing UI elements. Get out of my face and let me do my work.
Finder is bizarre in that it hasn't really changed much at all in 20+ years.
The stock file manager in Fedora, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu do this. And it's great, so you don't have to make all your folders the same.
Not sure about the Finder Window though.
Perhaps this was changed now? Big Sur does open a new window for me.
spacebar to preview.
select multiple items to preview them all.
From a UI perspective, it's 90% identical to windows. From a UX perspective though, something fundamental like Finder is still not up to the job IMO. Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens? I have to hit Option+N to actually display a Finder window.
Don't even get me started on the sort options. What kind of file manager applies a Sort view to every single directory, instead of the one you actually set the Sort view to?