When I came to Mac back in 2007 I assumed my dislike of Finder was just a matter of what I was used to. Six years of using Mac at home and Windows at work and nope. I do like column view, and you'll get my new Mac Mini out of my cold dead hands, but if I had a choice I'd have Windows Explorer on my Mac in a second. No hesitation.

Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.

Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.

windows explorer has had that feature for years as well

Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!

Start, type, search results. Its had that since vista!

It's not nearly as fast, by at least an order of magnitude. Also, because there is no centralized location for apps to be stored (e.g. /Applications) it has a harder time succeeding as an app launcher.

I can't tell the difference in speed between a 2007 Lenovo T61 and a 2010 MBP.

Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.

It never worked well for me, but I kill my search indexer process a lot because it turns my fan on.

Never had that problem!

And yet "locate" is banned by default.

Because it's redundant. man mdfind

If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.

10 yeas on, I have never finished waiting for Spotlight to index my drive and serve a query.

Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window. This turns out to be something I do a lot. So I wind up opening another finder window to do this. Inevitably I wind up with finder windows of different shapes and sizes all over the place. It boggles my mind that the Apple UI team can't see how inferior Finder is.

I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.

Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.

> Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window.

Uh, so does Finder. What are you talking about?

Not in one window. If the folders are nested in in different directories you need two windows. There is that feature where if you drag a file over a folder in the sidebar, and hover, it will open the folders you want in series, but it's very awkward. Unless I'm missing something, which is always a possibility!

As far as I can tell Windows and OS X are the same in this respect. I just moved a file from my Documents directory to my home directory on both systems, and the steps were pretty much identical.

hmmm, you can do that if the folders are close to each other in a directory. How do you do if each is nested deep in different paths? On Windows explorer you can drop down the folders to open any folder in the left side window to drag a file from the current folder?

I've switched over to mac as well. However, Finder is my #2 annoyance. #1 being I so fricking love Winamp, and nothing has come close to that on a mac (or linux) for that matter. And sure, winamp did come out with a mac app, but it was useless I found...

You have brought up a great point—why on earth is there no true quality alternative to iTunes out there? Are we Mac users that complacent?

There is. Try Enqueue.

It looks the same. It's still Lists. Lists lists lists. I'm tired of playing music in lists. I want something that organizes and helps me discover music the way I think about it. Lists are not a good interface for this and I don't understand how they persist to this day.

play[1] and cog[2] used to be good, but it doesn't look like either of them have been updated in quite a long time...though the bitbucket repo for cog is showing some action, so maybe it will become active again at some point.

Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).

[1]: http://sbooth.org/Play/

[2]: http://www.cogx.org/

[3]: http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/

It's been a while since I've used Winamp, but from what I remember, VLC has a similar interface and functionality.

...no it doesn't

Details, my good man! :) What does winamp do that VLC doesn't?

Try vox player

Question: can you run Winamp in Wine?

Easily answered:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...

I think the above translates to "no, not really."

Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.

And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how.

That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.

Cmd-shift-G in finder. (In an open file dialog, typing '~' or '/' will also bring up the same 'go to folder' dialog.)

Type cmd-shift-g in Finder or just type a forward slash in an open or save dialog to bring up a path entry window, much like the old GTK file dialog. To connect to a SMB system, use cmd-g and type smb://server/share

Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.

Command + Shift + G might be what you're looking for, as a kind of replacement for address bar.

wow, for linux people I have no nicer response than RTFM!