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  • Finder is indeed frustrating. "Recent" seems like an attempt to fix this without the need to use some giant camera roll?

    The (hard) problem is that almost every finder alternative/add-on I've tried is someone else's ideal workflow that still doesn't sit well with me. I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons.

    Both work marginally better (for me) when used in concert with the quick-find tools like Alfred (or Spotlight) and KRunner. None of these are perfect.

    Showerthought: maybe the "find files" interfaces aren't the worst offenders; maybe it's the "place files" workflows that are problematic and we're trying to solve the wrong problem?

    by davidee
  • If only recent actually worked. I see no rhyme or reason why something gets in recent. I guess finder has to be involved. So often I am working with files between apps, saving and opening and such and the files never appear in recent which defeats the purpose for me.

    And then we have the spotlight deamon processes which seem to exist only to burn earth's precious resources.

    But when it works it works great. ymmv

    by bahmboo
  • Wow. I'm a Linux user and I have to use Mac for some work related tasks. I genuinely hate Finder and was going to lean back and enjoy reading this article.

    This went into a direction I didn't expect at all.

    by xnickb
  • Yeah, as someone whose favorite file manager is Dolphin, I have the opposite preferences of the author of the marketing post. I feel like Finder is overly-simplified and tries to abstract the directory structure away from the user too much.
    by jlund-molfese
  • In the end, it turns out for me that the classic explorer Tree View is the most intuitive. I know where things are as a sub-tree system. I get that hard links etc. complicate this and perhaps there are smart folders etc which do not fit this model well but I find I frequently want to “Go Up” in the hierarchy and this requires an uncomfortable shortcut on a Macbook (arrow key) or a menu button rather than a toolbar icon.

    But these are complaints. The right answer is to see if I can build a file explorer for MacOS that behaves in the fashion I desire.

    by arjie
  • Once I got used to column view, I miss it on other operating systems. I don't feel like there's anything I can't do with two Finder windows in column view. And for everything else there's the terminal.
    by simondotau
  • Just the fact that there is no reliable way, other than 3rd party apps like FinderFix, to force Finder to open in a reasonably sized window rather than the tiny one that has roughly enough space for 6 icons in grid view makes it a garbage file manager.
    by getdustedyun
  • Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.

    The deciders for me, in case you're interested:

    - Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.

    - Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.

    - Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.

    I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)

    by eszed
  • It's funny, as a 20+ year macOS user, I've really struggled with file managers that are not Finder.

    I don't think it's that Finder is brilliant -- it just encourages a unique set of power user workflows that aren't replicated elsewhere.

    For example, Open/Save panels that act as drop targets, and navigate to the dropped file's parent folder. I use this all the time, and it drives me nuts when I can't do this on Linux (Nautilus) and Windows. Enter to rename, too. These habits are very hard to break!

    by iamcalledrob
  • You probably know this already but some don't (I certainly didn't for an embarrassingly long time): Rename is F2 in Windows and Linux (well, most distros File manager anyway).
    by thrwkmmshf00083
  • My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing software is ridiculous. And, yes, Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.

    I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.

    by SwellJoe
  • >My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop.

    I see people justify their Mac purchases this way all the time, but IMO it's just cope and not their actual primary reason for making that decision. I've never seen where the math actually worked out where the price/performance actually made Apple made sense.

    by Suppafly
  • same. now that there are finally good linux laptops with good battery and haptic touchpads i'm having a bit of buyers remorse, and will probably pick one up soon.

    such a waste of damn good hardware though

    by abacadaba
  • You know you can just use Linux on it. I work from a Linux VM in UTM as my main desktop whole day, with Mac OS just being a VM hypervisor for me, it's pretty good!
    by ivankra
  • “Weird for the sake of being weird”…you know Finder existed first, right?
    by wrs
  • Maybe because you can open a terminal, do port install mc and then ignore the Finder most of the time :)
    by nottorp
  • I went through similar feelings switching to the Mac ecosystem (from Linux) in 2012... But I quickly settled on some tools I wouldn't be without now.

    Finder is terrible, but I switched for Forklift early on. I think it's amazing, so much better than the Gnome and KDE file managers I used before. It covers so many bases, from being a twin-pane orthodox manager, directory comparer and synchroniser, bulk regex renamer, etc. Handles local directories as well as remote ones via SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Google Drive, SMB, NFS, etc. And switching to Alfred was a real pleasure. I could see where Gnome Do took inspiration from, but it's a pale imitation. I also installed iTerm2 early on, and I use it to this day. Easily the best fit terminal for my purposes.

    by hn_throw2025
  • It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.
    by raffraffraff
  • > So I built a custom app for him: a drawer that eliminates folder hierarchy and location knowledge

    Fair, that is something I've observed since the introduction of iOS, where most users don't navigate folders and open files, but flip it and open an app and browse the recent files.

    As for Finder itself, the column view and hit-space-to-preview is all I want for my basic needs and I miss it whenever I have to use Windows. Can't speak to other systems.

    by gherkinnn
  • Thinly veiled marketing post.

    I've had to use Finder, and it's definitely frustrating in a "Think Different" sort of way, but this article doesn't actually mention why beyond vague statements.

    Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode.

    by userbinator
  • It's my app, no veil intended. It pulls all the drives, folders into one stream . So it doesn't matter where a file is located. Then it reads what is inside so you can type in what you remember.
    by maltch
  • Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode.

    I can make the apologetics for just about anything in macOS. After over 20 years of using OS X/macOS, I still can't make the case for this one. Imagine a button has focus, you hit Enter, and it allows you to change the text on the button instead of executing the code behind button.click(). That behavior is just as dumb if a file has focus in Finder.

    by mikestew
  • Each and every comment that is in agreement here is a bunch of former Windows users who wanted to move Explorer to Mac with them. I have used MacOS for over 15 years. Finder has never stood in my way. I don’t even know what “see the file system” means. Too many words to say “I don’t know how to organize my files on a computer but I consider myself a power user”
    by lungeloslx
  • > Each and every comment that is in agreement here is a bunch of former Windows users who wanted to move Explorer to Mac with them

    Linux users also agree that Finder sucks.

    by NinjaTrance

  •     I don’t even know what “see the file system” means.
    It just means they want to see the hierarchy that the filesystem exposes. Here's a useful diagram [0] from the Wikipedia page on hierarchial file systems [1]. There are ways to show paths and directory structure in finder, but you're fighting against the intended usage.

    [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Fi...

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_file_system

    by AlotOfReading
  • Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get
    by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye
  • Finder is terrible. Not sure why it's worth defending to the point of attacking someone who simpy made something which fills its gaps.
    by greekrich92
  • Finder sucks, information storing and retrieval should be frictionless
    by imadtaieber
  • He’s complaining…because he sells a solution to this problem. I hated Finder when I switched to Mac back in 2007. So much so I bought PathFinder. One thing that pissed me off and still does, is when I copy over a folder with the same name, it doesn’t merge the contents, it deletes everything in the existing folder. That’s not what I expected as a Windows user and it still seems like the wrong behavior almost 20 years later. I no longer use PathFinder, it had its own problems and bugs…but in general I find Finder pretty lacking.
    by GiorgioG
  • So true, so true. Every time I think I've got my structure set up properly, I then do something in haste, and can't find it later. Power user and file manager are two totally different things.
    by maltch