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Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS

Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago. Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless. After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future: - You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too) - You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G - Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs) Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.
jshier 6y ago
Documents and Downloads are the actual directories on disk, they're not some sort of abstraction. It's pretty simple. /Users/<user>/Documents, /Users/<user>/Downloads, etc.
szhu 6y ago
I get what you mean, and I have the same complaints about the defaults. Here are some useful shortcuts to know, especially when fixing issues: - View > Go to Folder… (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to go to. - Cmd-Up takes you one level up. - Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the title bar to see the location of the current folder. This works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not just Finder! - Cmd-Shift-. to temporarily show hidden files. And here are some settings I recommend that turn Finder into a very pleasant experience for someone coming from Linux. I always set these as soon as I get a new account: - View > as Columns (You might need to set this a few times for different initial folders.) - View > Show Path Bar - Preferences > General: New Finder windows show (home folder) - Preferences > Sidebar > Favorites: Make sure (home folder) is checked. I'd actually recommend unchecking every other item in this group (except for Airdrop if you need it). Why: Having less sidebar items makes Column View work better because, when opening a folder in Column View, the sidebar item that's the closest ancestor is shown as the leftmost column. - Preferences > Sidebar > Locations: Make sure "Hard disks" is completely checked. By default, the / disk is hidden from the sidebar.
- xenadu02 6y ago
  If you want Finder to show dot files and system directories: defaults write com.apple.finder ShowAllFiles 1 Also note that shortcuts like ⌘⇧ G also work in standard open/save dialogs.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future: - You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too) - You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G - Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs) Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.

jshier 6y ago

Documents and Downloads are the actual directories on disk, they're not some sort of abstraction. It's pretty simple. /Users/<user>/Documents, /Users/<user>/Downloads, etc.

szhu 6y ago

I get what you mean, and I have the same complaints about the defaults. Here are some useful shortcuts to know, especially when fixing issues: - View > Go to Folder… (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to go to. - Cmd-Up takes you one level up. - Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the title bar to see the location of the current folder. This works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not just Finder! - Cmd-Shift-. to temporarily show hidden files. And here are some settings I recommend that turn Finder into a very pleasant experience for someone coming from Linux. I always set these as soon as I get a new account: - View > as Columns (You might need to set this a few times for different initial folders.) - View > Show Path Bar - Preferences > General: New Finder windows show (home folder) - Preferences > Sidebar > Favorites: Make sure (home folder) is checked. I'd actually recommend unchecking every other item in this group (except for Airdrop if you need it). Why: Having less sidebar items makes Column View work better because, when opening a folder in Column View, the sidebar item that's the closest ancestor is shown as the leftmost column. - Preferences > Sidebar > Locations: Make sure "Hard disks" is completely checked. By default, the / disk is hidden from the sidebar.

xenadu02 6y ago
If you want Finder to show dot files and system directories: defaults write com.apple.finder ShowAllFiles 1 Also note that shortcuts like ⌘⇧ G also work in standard open/save dialogs.