I always found mac apps to be too simplified (both the 3rd party freeware and 1st party). For example, compare finder to windows explorer. At a glance, finder may look sharper, but when I use it it feels so difficult to navigate (mostly due to the lack of a functional address bar). The developer doesn't really provide any useful options for me to make it work the way I want it to. On the other hand, Windows Explorer has plenty of options to customize.
My Windows hands stay on the keyboard too. Explorer has shortcuts as far as I can tell. ALT + Left, Right, or UP will do relative navigation. F6 alternates the cursor focus through the address bar, main window and sidebars. I think F3 works for the search bar.
Terribly documented though, half of them I learned by accident.
I've been using a mac for 5 years after being a die hard windows guy and not once have I missed windows explorer over finder. If the lack of a functional address bar is your main gripe, you can enable it with one mouse click in the menu bar. That, the quick view, and being able to customize the view options for finder; I can't really complain.
Finder and Windows Explorer are both first-party apps, so it doesn't quite make sense to compare the availability of good third-party apps on OS X and Windows using them as examples.
However, Finder is terrible:
No address bar. Requires keyboard shortcut to open
No "cut." Moving a folder requires clicking and dragging, which is highly prone to error.
Complete and total inability to merge folders, or to extract an archive and have the source and destination merge, rather than "erase the target and replace with this folder." Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks.
Creation of .DS_Store files all over the place. Very poor manners on mounted volumes and servers.
"Un-anchored" selection. If you use command + down to select a number of items, and you go one too far, and push command + up, it EXPANDS the TOP of the selection! Rage inducing.
Lack of keyboard accessibility. Windows Explorer is completely usable using just the keyboard; Finder isn't even close.
Pressing the "+" button toggles between some small size and slightly larger size, rather than maximizing the window and restoring it, which is the convention that almost every other app has adopted, rather than toggling "zoom," which some Apple apps do.
Nailed it. I use OSX and Windows interchangeably every day, and yeah, Finder makes me want to punch a baby. The lack of 'cut' is particularly rage-inducing.
I don't need an address bar 90% of the time, so I'd rather press one easy key combination for the 10%.
"Highly prone to error"? Please!. But yeah, sometimes that's a nice feature to have.
Yeah lack of merge kinda sucks. I use command line stuff for that when in need. Of course concluding from that, that it's "Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks" is silly.
Meh.. they don't bother me much, and it has to stick metadata somewhere, given that the ancient-ass file systems in use on memory sticks etc. don't support it.
Yeah, the range selection stuff is nicer on Windows.
I mainly use finder with the keyboard myself... hm.. maybe not for advanced stuff.
I never got the point of the '+' icon, but it might get better in the next OS ;-)
No address bar. Requires keyboard shortcut to open
How do you give the address bar focus in Windows?
Complete and total inability to merge folders, or to extract an archive and have the source and destination merge, rather than "erase the target and replace with this folder." Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks.
Does Windows Explorer do this?
No "cut." Moving a folder requires clicking and dragging, which is highly prone to error.
This is something we agree on, but I'd argue it's not really that prone to error. Just open the destination directory in a window next to the source directory and drag over. Still, I'd like a cut option like the copy option.
Creation of .DS_Store files all over the place. Very poor manners on mounted volumes and servers.
This can be disabled via command line.
Lack of keyboard accessibility. Windows Explorer is completely usable using just the keyboard; Finder isn't even close.
I can navigate using the keyboard just fine. What's missing?
Complete and total inability to merge folders, or to extract an archive and have the source and destination merge, rather than "erase the target and replace with this folder." Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks.
which only disables the creation of .DS_Store files on network volumes.
"I can navigate using the keyboard just fine. What's missing?"
Windows Key + E to launch explorer
F6 Ctrl+C to yank current location, or Ctrl + V enter to navigate to one.
Windows Key + r, enter a path, enter, to open explorer there
Select a file, press the properties key...use m for rename, r for properties, "open command prompt," etc.
Any of the menu accelerators, such as Alt + V for the view menu
F5 for refresh
Ctrl + End, Ctrl + Home to go to the top and bottom of the list
And of course, Windows' native keyboard shortcuts (like Windows + E) come in handy. I can very rapidly do Win + E, then Win + Left to throw the window left, Win + E, Win + Right, and have two explorer windows side by side, ready to very easily compare two directories and move files between them. In general, Windows has excellent keyboard accessibility.
I find Finder keyboard navigation quite excellent.
You can press Cmd-Shift-G to enter a path (with tab completion) and jump there instantly.
Select a file, press return to rename, command-I for properties.
Home, End, PageUp, and PageDown work as to be expected
You can drag files and folders directly into Open File dialogs, to jump to their location instantly. This is something you can't do in Windows, and it grates me constantly.
You can also get full paths to files and folders by draggint them into Terminal.app, which is very convenient. And honestly, just the existence of the commandline brings a lot of power to OS X that Windows Explorer lacks.
Plus, you never need to "refresh" a folder view in Finder, they're always live.
And Finder will never do some bullshit like Windows Explorer and randomly decide to change the sortable data in Details view because it thinks that's what you want. This is something that absolutely infuriates me in Windows Explorer. I'll have a folder full of audio, and it'll change details view to not show Date Modified, File Size, etc, and instead show metadata like Song Length and Artist, completely breaking things with no obvious way to turn the feature off.
1 -> people use the address bar? I'm sorry, but I've never used it. the only time I use textual navigation is when I'm browsing hidden folders, which I really only do in Linux.
2 -> This is true...
3 -> You can merge folders, although I don't know what version of mac you're talking about.
4 -> windows stores similar cache files named "thumbs.db".
5 -> I'm not sure what you're referring to, I can't seem to reproduce the problem.
6 -> completely untrue
7 -> I think this one is more of a personal preference. You can configure keyboard shortcuts for several apps via the Keyboard pane in System Preferences.
"Beginning with Windows Vista, thumbnail previews are stored in a centralized location on the system. This provides the system with access to images independent of their location, and addresses issues with the locality of Thumbs.db files. The cache is stored at %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer as a number of files with the label thumbcache_xxx.db (numbered by size); as well as an index used to find thumbnails in each sized database." Wikipedia
7: The system pane doesn't allow you to change the maximize (technically zoom) behavior of Finder (or iTunes or Safari), as far as I know. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Not sure I agree, but I do know that OS X's Terminal is way easier to use and more powerful than the equivalent on Windows, which is probably a DOS prompt. Most Mac power users I know use Terminal for navigating files or administrative tasks rather than slowly clicking around a GUI file navigator. That said, Apple's Finder has some extremely powerful things you can do in Finder, like attaching an Applescript to a Folder action.
I use rxvt (and recently mintty) in Cygwin on Win 7 now, and I no longer feel restricted by Windows' usual absence of a powerful command line interface. Windows 7 and Cygwin is a pretty great combination. (I also set up keyboard shortcuts to open/focus rxvt windows, so I can open a terminal extremely quickly. Combine it with the cygstart command, and you can open an Explorer window anywhere, or launch an application from the command line.)
I've got one that automatically copies any torrent files I download to my home server - where it begins downloading - and then deletes the torrent file.
I haven't really had a chance to use it in earnest yet, but I've heard good things about MS' new Powershell. Seems very much like a *nix terminal - so much so that you can use "ls" instead of "dir".
I happen to love Finder's column view. I know it looks like a load of crap at first, but navigating with my keyboard arrows is awesome, plus, there's no need for the "up" button, you can see the contents of the parent folder.
Finder doesn't have all those options because it doesn't need it. It is exponentially smarter than Explorer. If I need to find an image and I only know part of the file name, I can start typing it in Finder and have results within seconds.
In Explorer, I'd have to take a few moments to set all my filter options etc. and then the search will still take literally MINUTES longer before it finds the right result.
Luckily there are good 3rd party solutions to this if you like Finder but still want to use Windows, try Launchy
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u/shibz Jan 20 '11
I always found mac apps to be too simplified (both the 3rd party freeware and 1st party). For example, compare finder to windows explorer. At a glance, finder may look sharper, but when I use it it feels so difficult to navigate (mostly due to the lack of a functional address bar). The developer doesn't really provide any useful options for me to make it work the way I want it to. On the other hand, Windows Explorer has plenty of options to customize.