This was my instant reaction when I started using a Mac. But 15 years later, even knowing more tricks for interacting with it, it still baffles me. Once you've used Windows Explorer and a few Linux distro navigators, there's no denying that Finder is unquestionably worst in class.

When I started using a Mac many years ago, I also could not believe how terrible Finder is. This is software from the "design" company.

One of the biggest pitfalls I ran into at the time (and remember from the top of my head) was that when you copy a folder, and a folder with the same name already exists at the destination, it will quietly replace it, rather than giving me a dialog asking if I want to Replace or Merge.

Oh, that I can't switch on/off show hidden files, I have to run some command line command to do that...

I agree 100%. Been using macs for 15 years now, but the windows XP explorer in particular was fundamentally objectively better than finder, and it's nuts they haven't figured it out.

One of the things I find most baffling is that in order to "go to a folder by path" (e.g. ~) you have to hit command-shift-G ? What kind of hidden witchcraft is this?

It feels like it was designed for people who cannot understand a directory structure. But even that is done poorly, because it's not particularly useful. That said, this kepter thing looks pretty bad too.

This may be of use:

> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

Change to `false` to reverse it. You have to `killall Finder` or force quit it for each to take effect.

Also, Shift-Command-. (dot) in Finder. You can find a lot of useful settings that can be adjusted to your preferred mode digging through this repo (not affiliated): https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.

Explorer is a much better tool than Finder. Couldn't agree more.

What do you mean by "see the file system?" It's not exactly hard to enable in Finder. In Finder's settings, one can have the root directory, home directory, etc. enabled in the sidebar. Not to mention, one can easily drag & drop common folders into the sidebar too.

Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.

Imo tech companies want people to be as tech-illiterate as possible. Tech illiterate people will not realise how the tech company did extra work to make their product less capable and less empowering to the user in favour of being more beneficial and empowering to the tech company itself.

Obfuscating the file system has been a popular move in this regard. A file system is so elegant and empowering and useful for so many tasks, of course they want to hide it.

Yes one of the first things I did when moving to mac was pinning Macintosh HDD root folder to Finder, but that kept going away every time I restarted my Max so I bought Bloom which is way better

this