this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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I still contend that the best file browser ever made is the macOS Finder. When someone makes something that good for Linux, I'll be very happy
What. What?? Finder is the fucking worst. It doesn't have a sensible tree view, does it?
seems sensible to me? its not amazing but i dont mind it ... what doesnt work for you?
Sidebar defaults are bad. There's no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can't see the file system's structure in Finder. The GUI doesn't have a way to go "up" in the directory structure. I don't think you can do it in the GUI alone.
It won't let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don't know how to open stuff in places like that without
cd'ing to the location in the terminal, and doingopen .in the desired directory.The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It's also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.
I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn't want to cooperate. If I do find the file I'm looking for, and want the full path, it doesn't want to give it. I don't even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> "new iterm2 tab here" ->
pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.Contrast with windows' default explorer. It's not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there's the "my pc", click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.
Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows' Explorer. Had no complaints about it.
You really don't know how to use macOS, lol
Please. Elaborate.
That would be a waste of my time. You're not someone who needs to know how to use one, so what's the point of telling you how to use one? You're an intelligent human being, you can figure it out if and when you need to. Until then, whatever tech you're using serves your needs so it's no biggie.
I was hoping you had some insight and revelations about how to use Finder.
Well, the moment you want to start being a power user on the Mac, you have to learn a few common menu items or their keyboard shortcuts. This is by design because Apple doesn't want to make it easy to mistakenly mess up your computer, and even with things being this way by default with all these restrictions, you'd find that people still find ways to break it. It's stunning.
Knowing that, it's understandable that some settings would be required to be tweaked if a power user were to use the system. You can hit cmd+, to open the settings, customize your side bar, and add desktop icons for any connected drives. To jump to a certain directory, you would use the Go > Go to Folder or shift+cmd+G to type in your location. This works for hidden files too, but it may be easier to simply use the terminal when working with hidden files such as these.
To move up a directory when you're caught in the middle of a file tree, you can use cmd+up arrow, or use Go > Enclosing Folder. Alternatively, you could just start using the column view, which is one of the great features I tend to shout out the Finder for in the first place. It makes it incredibly easy to navigate deeply nested directories.
You can also use cmd+j to change the view settings in any folder, and it will remember your preferences per each folder.
The cmd+i information pop-up is extremely useful and well laid out, easy to use, and intuitive.
You can tap the space bar after highlighting most files to view a preview of the file, including media files. This preview is also used in the gallery and column view in Finder, which can make working with media files much easier and simpler.
These are all things you learn when you spend a lot of time using macOS. Keyboard shortcuts obviously exist on everything, but with macOS they're pretty much required for power users.
I used treesize once to clean up my computer. That's what a file system should be like.
Genuine question, is this trolling or do you seriously believe this?
Is it that outlandish that someone can appreciate a piece of closed-source software?
Appreciate isn't the claim tho
Well, Windows Explorer is terrible, Dolphin is better but still not really that great, Nautilus is stripped back and barebones, Thunar is ancient and barely competes with what Windows XP had, and vifm is unreasonable unless you exclusively work in terminals. Did I miss any that are even remotely popular?
Dolphin seems great to me! What do you think Finder does better than Dolphin?
In fairness, Dolphin is definitely the best available on Linux. I think Finder strikes the perfect balance of simplicity and customization. It's easy to figure out for a newbie and powerful enough for a developer. Dolphin's learning curve is a bit steeper and in my view it has too many features on offer. This is a common problem with KDE software. It's not a big deal because KDE stuff isn't used on commercially-available products that need tech support, and anyone using Linux should be able to get by just fine with it, but I still think Finder is simply better software with a longer history and judicious use of new features
I'm sure there are organizations using Plasma desktop with IT departments supporting it, but I definitely take your point that Apple has orders of magnitude more spending on UI/UX and software development
I'm largely curious about Finder these days since I used macOS almost exclusively from the G4 days right up until about the time they switched to ARM, so it's been a few years. I'm curious if Apple has made any significant improvements to Finder in the past, say, four years?
Well, I stopped using macOS for about four years because the 2020 models were just... bad. I am back to using it now because my current employer provided me with a MacBook Pro to use, and I've gotten to enjoy the current version of Finder. I think the most notable change in recent years is the addition of tabbed finder windows, and just a ton of really small changes to make things a bit easier, like how they changed the way copying files works to be paused and resumed from the finder itself.
In macOS 15 I'm mostly happy that Microsoft's window tiling patent expired so we can finally tile windows natively in macOS without needing that bettersnaptool app.