alt Hacker NewsFinder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Comments
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
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’d like to propose a rule that all the Finder bashers in this thread accompany their complaint with at least one concrete example.
I’m no Apple fanboy, but blind hate is just as bad as blind love, and so far 100% of the specifics brought up have turned out to be people who just don’t have a basic familiarity with the software. I genuinely don’t begrudge a person sticking to what they know, but it’s a point towards what’s good for you and maybe whether it’s intuitive, not towards whether Finder is objectively good or lacks features. I’d be happy to read both real issues and people learning more about Finder, but just “Finder sucks” doesn’t help anybody.
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.
I expected people here to recommend several dual-pane file manager (aka orthodox file manager) as a replacement for Finder.
But I see not a single comment recommending one? No good UI ones on macOS?
> Computer folders are still organized in structures set up some 50 years ago. Operating systems change. Computers change. Search changes. But this has never changed. I can't change that.
And we've been using the Dewey Decimal System for like 150 years. Both are good systems. Kepter (a visual/gallery system) would break down when looking at more than a dozen files (or when files are very similar). I don't really think it's a good idea.
What we desperately need is a system-wide (or at least documents-wide) semantic/vector search, which is basically a weekend project and a $4.99 one-time purchase.
The problem with Finder is historic. The classic Mac finder was a work of art, if you are the sort of person that arranges things spatially, but most programmers are not. Hence NeXT created something else which got merged back incoherently into what became OSX.
The Risc OS filer remains king, largely because managing windows on Risc OS is much more tolerable.
At this point, I've come to live with it. I do use Supercharge[1] to fix some of the warts.
I agree! I've been building this alternative file browser called 'Overlap' which uses Mac's tagging system. Mainly for images. It suggests tags based on Apple's photo classifier & similarity to your own tags. You can also explore data using a visual Venn Diagram. https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/Overlap
By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.
Finder is one of the reasons I quit Mac. Main reason was that I had a knack for crashing it. And really not a fan of their marketing department not being completely in sync with their engineering department. Great marketing! But spent like five grand on a desktop Tower Mac and final cut Pro could not use all the cores. This was probably about 10-15 years ago.
This looks cool, but my least favorite things about Finder are not actually related to finding things. I prefer column mode, but:
1. When I right click, I can't create a new file of any kind. I can create a new folder—sometimes (see the next point).
2. If the folder is full, it's virtually impossible to right-click an empty spot to create a new folder. You have to scroll all the way to the top/bottom and right click the very narrow spot between the folder and the header/footer.
I think you're gonna lose a lot of comments here to the "Finder" word here. The problem is not the Finder but directories, which exist on all operating systems.
With that aside, this is a great idea for most files. Of course my images are still in folders with the projects they belong to, but my life photos are in one stream. Files, contacts, a lot of data would benefit greatly from this visualization.
As for people with 1000 files on their desktop, who cares, they are as good as hoarders and they get what it comes to them. Discipline helps both in the real and in the digital world.
I see no reference to using Finder in 1990, and original flaws.
Also Spotlight worked decently until a few years ago, but not anymore
Does anyone else experience this? Like it freezes when searching for programs?
So it's like fancy "last used" in finder?
Surprised by the rest of the comments because I genuinely like Finder more than any other file manager I've used. I run it in column mode all the time. Space-to-QuickLook is also amazing.
How do I fix search on OSX? I can never find anything, even when I do the name contains search.
This submission appears to be a self-promotional advertisement by the developer, who created a HN account literally an hour ago.
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anything, this should be a Show HN.
Finder is fucking dire. I spend more time on the terminal.
The vertical column mode is useless as file names are always too long. It forces you to drag and drop and open loads of windows rather than cut and paste via menus. Open vs rename is fucked up. Half the machine is hidden initially. Hiding file extensions is just broken. Every view seems to forget what state it’s in. The file copying and continue copying thing fucks up network drives. cp is actually an order of magnitude faster. The icons at the top are shit. All the keyboard shortcuts require mutant hands that only emacs users have. The trash can semantics of “put back” are just crap. It crashes at least once a day for me. I could go on for days.
Windows 10 is notably better.
It's so bad for me that I often drop down into Terminal, find there (with 'find') and then use 'open'. I'm very used to doing this.
I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.
and dont even get me started on the missing backspace key..
Coming from Windows, what's outrageous about Finder, is that when I'm looking at a SMB share has is named the same as a local directory, it is very confusing as to which location is which. Scary. Like, show the full path! Not "Folder" at the top. Just crazy.
Recently switched to Mac and I always have this question mark like how can this be so bad after decades and why is everyone cool with it
unpopular opinion apparently, but i don‘t understand the finder hate. as a real-life, non-software-developer user, i couldn‘t care less about library folders, root folders, or a unix-tradition file system at all. i want my folders with my documents, pictures, etc. to me that‘s far more user-friendly and comprehensible than what explorer exposes to normal people.
Finder is really limited in many ways but it's one of the only FM that supports Miller columns, which I use quite a bit.
I’m now a full Mac user (personal + work), that came from Windows. Hate to say it, but Windows Explorer is better than Finder
I find this entire rant to be utterly ridiculous. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I do not think there is anything wrong with Finder. It's honestly no worse than any other file manager that I have used. I much prefer Finder to any alternative I have tried.
I really enjoy the various keyboard shortcuts [1]. I honestly wish more file managers had some of these features. I probably use "shift+command+g" the most. It's so nice being able to jump through Finder like changing directories in the terminal.
Honestly, for more complex tasks, I actually just use the terminal anyway.
[dead]
Water is wet.
Finder is by far the worst file manager ever created.
Apple has repeatedly over the years attempted to create interfaces where knowing where the actual data was saved was no necessary to using and finding that data. iTunes, iPhoto, most of iOS.
It’s usually met with a lot of resistance from people who have carefully and painstakingly crafted their perfect file hierarchies and hate it when Apple messes with that.
Some of the content recognition stuff in this seem pretty interesting, but I’m not sure that “everything in a single folder with preview thumbnails turned on” would be less “frustrating” for me than the current finder paradigm. This seems like it’s aiming for the iOS photos interface but for all of your files. In general I find searching for one specific photo in that interface to be more frustrating than knowing a hierarchy it would have been saved under. But for finding recent photos and finding a cluster of temporally related photos it is better. Is that a paradigm that works for all files too? For recents probably, but I’m not sure I often look for temporally related files. Still, this is a neat looking program/project, and like I said the content recognition stuff does seem interesting.
As a Windows user for years until 2 years ago, I can’t believe how unusable finder is. It’s just terrible. I feel like it actively hides the filesystem from you at every turn.
Windows was bad but at least Explorer (windows 10 version anyway) let you easily SEE the file system
I’m sure as hell not buying a subscription project to fix that though lololol