Is that standard now, or did I add it long ago and forget?
#!/usr/bin/env bash
####################
# Description: Get the path of the most recently used Finder window
# Author: Ancapistani
# Version: 1.0.0
####################
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
-e "if (${1-1} <= (count Finder windows)) then"\
-e "get POSIX path of (target of window ${1-1} as alias)"\
-e 'else' \
-e 'get POSIX path of (desktop as alias)'\
-e 'end if' \
-e 'end tell';
This bites me on fake FAT filesystems over USB for hardware development kits, and I usually just turn those features off. The heuristics there are often terrible, and I'd rather create a build system that writes a new image, instead of doing manual drag-and-drops.
Gnome File and Finder both have such issue. Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.
The Finder has an equivalent with Command-Shift-G, and if that key shortcut is too cumbersome it (along with all other Mac menu items) can be re-bound in System Preferences under the Keyboard prefpane.
Most of the things mentioned in this comment chain are easily discoverable in the Finder's menus… it really pays to peruse menus in Mac apps when searching for a function.
If the path bar is showing a folder, you can right click it and select "Open in terminal".
The resulting path input modal even supports tab completion.
This will copy either the directory (if no selection) or the selected file(s).
If you enable the path bar, I believe this is also a copyable element.
Finally, dropping a file or directory into a plain text control that cannot take file or folder references (like this HN comment box) will fall back to the path name.
1. Defaults to the columnar format. It's crazy - to move from a parent to child you've to move the mouse the whole width of the column. Whereas in Windows 3.1 File Manager, you'd have to move less than 10 pixels.
2. Now you could switch to the List View. But in Windows 3.1 File Manager, I can see a tree of directories on the left, and the directory contents on the right. That IMO is way cleaner than a single pane. Navigating to a child directory in the right pane also synchronizes the tree on the left pane. I can't be sure about the last one though because Win 3.1 was nearly 3 decades back, but I that's how it works today.
* Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.
* Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
* Renaming multiple files is a chore. You expect to rename a file, then press tab to highlight the next file, and begin typing. Instead, you... do some combination of enter, tab, then enter again, except it never quite works the way you expect, and sometimes the file moves because the sorting changes after you pressed enter the first time, and for some reason pressing tab actually moves you to the next folder.
* Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
* For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
* In general, the number of contextual commands you just have to discover by trial and error, or by looking them up on the internet, because they are hidden in the UI. Even the right-click menu doesn't list things like "open in slideshow", because the right click menu has a secret menu of its own which you have to press [cmd] to see.
* There is no preview panel visible by default, that's another option you have to turn on, like showing the file path. This stuff should all be on by default.
* You have to view file info in a separate window.
* It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.
> Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
> For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
Adding a modifier to these functions helps prevent accidental irritating (opening 500 selected files) or potentially destructive (moving selected files to the trash) actions due to fat fingering, which is a particularly likely occurrence on laptops where edge keys like delete and return are easy to accidentally hit just moving around one's laptop. The accidental opening by hitting return one is something I've done several times over the years and it's never not infuriating.
On Windows, deleting it moves it to the Recycle Bin which is functionally equivalent to what macOS does. In fact off the top of my head I don't know of a modern desktop environment that just directly deletes files without recourse.
> It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.
Ironically, holding down "Option" to see hidden menu items is not discoverable at all. Most people will only ever do it by accident. The point is that anything commonly desired should not be hidden like that.
There's also the 'Help' menu in Finder that has the manual, tips, and menu search functionality.
That Finder and the desktop are a single process is an implementation detail that should be hidden from UI mechanisms like this.
So, not discoverable at all.
I guess I could also question the proposition that Apple doesn't change things people like about Macs. I could list a few examples of them doing that, too.
Thanks for the suggestion that I read a book.
If you want it different, you want Linux or a BSD.
> Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
The default behavior used to be great, ~10 years ago (extremely snappy search scoped to the current folder). The change to searching the whole computer with significant lag was an absurd and mysterious regression.
It’s like the difference between US vs. UK spelling conventions. A British person saying “Americans are bad at spelling words” is just trolling.
Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste? Cut content exists only on the pasteboard. If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
This is why they went with the select-and-copy and select-and-move operations instead, and mapped them onto the copy/paste system. A true 'cut' would be too destructive.
I'd expect that nothing will happen, Cut will wait for paste operation. It's not delete, where content is gone immediately. If no paste will follow, then Cut is not executed. Cut marks file for move operation, if no move is executed, then nothing will be lost.
> If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
We're talking about files here, not text. Text behaves differently. I'd argue that Cut operation as it is in text editors, is not logical but it is what it is and people are used to it. For deleting there's Delete operation, Cut should not be equal to Delete in some occasions.
Well, that's exactly how Finder works, isn't it? Cmd+C marks files, Cmd+V copies them, Cmd+Opt+V moves them.
On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.
In my mind the only advantage the Windows way has is that it belongs to the more popular platform.
* Keyboard Maestro (automation) * BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience) * Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world) * PopClip. * Fantastical (calandar app)
You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.
I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.
I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.
There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.
I haven’t personally used clean shot X, but a tool has to be way, way, way better than the built-in default to get me to change. It doesn’t matter what clean shot X can do better; clean shot X loses because se it isn’t going to be on every Mac I sit in front of.
Better screen recording would be nice but I do it rarely enough that Quicktime is fine. If I did it more I'd definitely have to find some other solution.
All the marking up and such—well, there are many reasons that Preview is possibly my favorite single program on Macs.
Everything about it verifiably worse than the separate apps Apple ships with macOS, from data storage to integration.
That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...
10.4 Tiger
They started to ruin the iCal user interface in 10.5 Leopard.
In general, 2006 was peak Mac. When it was Apple main product, before iPhone.
What does interest me is that pre-Lion software is well understood. The behaviors and expectations and commands are re-implementable. Isn't it time someone just made SwiftUI-Tiger or somesuch?
Mac Mail is probably the worst application I've used on Mac (+ the one on the iOS is not far behind). Search is atrocious - like unusably so, it constantly has syncing issues (even with iCloud) when trying to get new mail, it's incredibly slow, and I don't care for the design.
I was agreeable until that point. Outlook did/does more to ruin email and discussion on the internet than any other app in that realm.
I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.
I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.
Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.
These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.
Thanks for the valuable feedback, good to know its worth it.
I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.
It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.
I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.
I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.
The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.