“Each user gets a different view” is breaking the resemblance with reality. I think you can have a compromise here. Let the settings within a window (sort by d

“Each user gets a different view” is breaking the resemblance with reality. I think you can have a compromise here. Let the settings within a window (sort by date/name, icon/list view) be shared among the users but keep the window's spatial information itself local. That way when each user opens a folder the window always appears in the same location they're used to. If one user has a much larger display than everyone else there won't be any issues with that user leaving windows off the screen of other users. I also think disclosure triangles were (¿one of?) the first thing(s) that broke the spatial finder. You're right in that they allowed users to peek at a folder's contents without opening the folder and to see the contents in list view. However, they didn't break that folder's spatial information and so if you double-clicked on that folder's icon while in list view it would open just as normal with whatever view (list/icon) and window size/shape/position it previously had. Having said that, based on my memory of using classic Mac OS, when I chose to put a folder into list view and use the disclosure triangles it was because it contained a lot of files (usually similar in purpose) and I wanted to keep them sorted and grouped together so they were easy to find. If I was working on a project with a smaller number of major files, I'd use icon view for those. This was not at all like the fundamental damage Mac OS X's Finder did to spatial orientation with its introduction of browser windows.