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This sound about as useful as a man page. For me it often goes like this: "What's the command that shows me file system usage again?" > man -k file system usa

by vitd 11y ago

This sound about as useful as a man page. For me it often goes like this: "What's the command that shows me file system usage again?" > man -k file system usage result = 5 pages of matching commands, often poorly formatted, word wrapping oddly, sometimes without even carriage returns between the commands, so it's all one long list. And this is in Unix which has had something like 45 years to clean up this mess. I don't hold out hope that this sort of interface will ever be presented usefully, and we already have a better system in a GUI.

falcolas 11y ago
As opposed to the discoverability within the Mac interface for showing disk usage? I can't tell you how long it took me to find it. And heaven help you if you want to find out where all of that data is on the hard drive. Oh, by the way, it's at: Apple menu -> About This Mac -> Storage And don't alt-tab away from it; you can't get back to it using the keyboard. You have to use Mission Control or back through the Apple menu again.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  A simpler alternative that has existed for decades in Mac OS is right-click disk -> Get Info, which is analogue to right-click disk -> Properties on Windows. That’ll give you usage/free space remaining and is probably as discoverable as it gets short of creating an entirely separate app explicitly named “Disk Usage” or some such.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    Simply getting to a finder window where I can do a "Get Info" on a hard drive requires finding your way to the "Computer" finder window, which requires digging in menus or right click context pulldowns on window titles (?). While it works on folders, it just gives you a question mark for the size while it is working out the size of the sub-items on disk with no indication that it's actually going to change that. So yes, there are alternative methods, but they are no more friendly to discoverability as the Apple Menu method.
- radiorental 11y ago
  'As opposed to the discoverability within the Mac interface for showing disk usage?' The answer lies in your question. A lot of power user (yes, relative but Apple have focused on consumer) functionality is buried in the gui, and every release pushes stuff deeper in to the interface.

by vitd 11y ago

falcolas 11y ago

As opposed to the discoverability within the Mac interface for showing disk usage? I can't tell you how long it took me to find it. And heaven help you if you want to find out where all of that data is on the hard drive. Oh, by the way, it's at: Apple menu -> About This Mac -> Storage And don't alt-tab away from it; you can't get back to it using the keyboard. You have to use Mission Control or back through the Apple menu again.

kitsunesoba 11y ago
A simpler alternative that has existed for decades in Mac OS is right-click disk -> Get Info, which is analogue to right-click disk -> Properties on Windows. That’ll give you usage/free space remaining and is probably as discoverable as it gets short of creating an entirely separate app explicitly named “Disk Usage” or some such.
- falcolas 11y ago
  Simply getting to a finder window where I can do a "Get Info" on a hard drive requires finding your way to the "Computer" finder window, which requires digging in menus or right click context pulldowns on window titles (?). While it works on folders, it just gives you a question mark for the size while it is working out the size of the sub-items on disk with no indication that it's actually going to change that. So yes, there are alternative methods, but they are no more friendly to discoverability as the Apple Menu method.
radiorental 11y ago
'As opposed to the discoverability within the Mac interface for showing disk usage?' The answer lies in your question. A lot of power user (yes, relative but Apple have focused on consumer) functionality is buried in the gui, and every release pushes stuff deeper in to the interface.