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A few points: 1. You’re not supposed to quit Finder.app. Unless you customise macOS somehow, the ability to do so is carefully hidden. There’s no menu item to

by mikl 5y ago

A few points: 1. You’re not supposed to quit Finder.app. Unless you customise macOS somehow, the ability to do so is carefully hidden. There’s no menu item to quit it, Cmd-Q does nothing, and even the Force Quit menu has “Relaunch” for Finder rather than Force Quit. Any weirdness you might encounter from quitting Finder is entirely your own fault. 2. There’s a long history behind some of these things. macOS UI conventions stretch all the way back to macOS 1.0, released in 1984. Apple has preserved much of the behaviour of older versions of macOS, like keyboard short cuts and (some) of the spatial behaviour of the Finder. It might not be to your taste, but other long-time Mac users enjoy them. If you don’t like the spatial-ness, the Finder’s column view might be more to your liking. 3. Speaking of taste, many of these gripes are just complaining that macOS doesn’t work like other operating systems. If you want your OS to work like Windows, maybe just use Windows? You think the Enter key should open things in Finder? Long time Mac users would be incensed if Apple changed this, because we’re used to using Enter to rename things, and Cmd-O if we want to open them. Window zoom not making sense to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to other people. There certainly are some valid points in there, but I certainly hope Apple doesn’t “fix” your other complaints, because that would break conventions we’ve spent decades getting used to.

gatonegro 5y ago
> Window zoom not making sense to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to other people. Could you explain it to me? macOS is not my favourite OS at all, but I can use it without much trouble if I need to and agree that many of these complaints boil down to the author not liking or understanding the macOS workflow. Window zoom, however, always struck me as wildly inconsistent and unpredictable. For context, I started back in the days of Mac OS X Tiger, up to Catalina. Window zoom never made the slightest amount of sense to me.
- mikl 5y ago
  Window zoom asks the application to “right-size” their window. The application then gets to decide what the “right” size is. For example, a Finder window will size itself so it can display all the contents of the folder it displays (if possible). It’s up to the application developer to implement this correctly, so if it is inconsistent, that’s technically not Apple’s fault. For applications that does not support this, the fallback is just to fill the screen, a bit like maximise does on Windows. In more recent macOS releases, the new(er) full screen mode works more like maximise does on Windows, and has now taken over the green button on the menu bar for most apps, so the old zoom feature is more obscure than ever.
  - gatonegro 5y ago
    Thanks, I honestly was not aware that "adjust window to content" is (or used to be) the intended behaviour. I saw apps that did it over the years, but I remember it being inconsistent even from one Apple app to the next. I also want to say that I remember Apple changing the green button to a maximise-like function, though I can't remember during which release that happened. Probably when they introduced virtual desktops and full screen apps. Of course, UX guidelines can only do so much without developers following them. That explains why the green button is so unpredictable. You never know if it'll do full screen, resize the window, maximise, or just ignore you.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Well you ought to be able to distinguish “Zoom” and “Full Screen” because the icon within the window control will be a plus symbol if it’s Zoom and two arrows pointing at 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock if it’s full screen. By default it’s full screen now, and you have to hold option to bring the Zoom control up (which since the advent of full screen is inconsistent even in Apple’s own apps). Double clicking the title bar (in the decreasing amount of empty space in modern Mac OS X chrome) will also net you Zoom functionality without holding option.
      - gatonegro 5y ago
        Interesting! I don't think I noticed that before. I got used to just doing Cmd+Ctrl+F to do full screen, or manually resize windows. Probably not ideal, but it felt consistent at least.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    You missed a nice feature absent in Windows afaik, which is that the last state of the window is remembered and recalled by hitting the green button a second time.
mort96 5y ago
That first point is especially weird I thought. The author writes: "unlike other DWMs Finder can be killed completely", but I've killed explorer.exe on Windows many times and achieved the same effect as he's getting from killing Finder. I don't know where he's getting this idea that Finder can be killed but Explorer is unkillable. And yeah, almost everything else is either "it's not Windows" or minor but valid annoyances. A bit disappointing, since there's a lot of big problems to complain about which aren't mentioned.
bitigchi 5y ago
> (some) of the spatial behaviour of the Finder. In fact, there is a horde of macOS users begging to have full Spatial Finder back.
dolni 5y ago
- mikl 5y ago
  We’re talking about macOS here. Your complaints about hardware features have little to do with this discussion. Macs still have headphone jacks, too.
  - dolni 5y ago
    Well you can replace the USB ports and a headphone jack by "breaking third-party MDM features" if you care THAT much about differentiating between the operating system and hardware (not that you should, because they're the same damn company). MDM features, like USB ports, are way more important that esoteric keybinds from the 1980s. > Macs still have headphone jacks, too. Oh, by Apple's grace, I am so thankful! Don't worry. This isn't a piety test.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
>There’s a long history behind some of these things. macOS UI conventions stretch all the way back to macOS 1.0, released in 1984. maybe some of those conventions are outdated The main gripe i have with macOS, for a company so focused on accessibility it's disappointing the lack of UI scaling options. You really can't do much compared to Windows. Linux also suck at this in terms of the basic options available.
- SllX 5y ago
  > maybe some of those conventions are outdated If you want to make this case, you have to make it on a case-by-case basis. It isn’t sufficient to say something is outdated, you have to make the case as to why it is worth changing now. They got a lot right in the original Macintosh, and they refined what they had a lot throughout the entire Classic and Mac OS X eras.

by mikl 5y ago

gatonegro 5y ago

> Window zoom not making sense to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to other people. Could you explain it to me? macOS is not my favourite OS at all, but I can use it without much trouble if I need to and agree that many of these complaints boil down to the author not liking or understanding the macOS workflow. Window zoom, however, always struck me as wildly inconsistent and unpredictable. For context, I started back in the days of Mac OS X Tiger, up to Catalina. Window zoom never made the slightest amount of sense to me.

mikl 5y ago
Window zoom asks the application to “right-size” their window. The application then gets to decide what the “right” size is. For example, a Finder window will size itself so it can display all the contents of the folder it displays (if possible). It’s up to the application developer to implement this correctly, so if it is inconsistent, that’s technically not Apple’s fault. For applications that does not support this, the fallback is just to fill the screen, a bit like maximise does on Windows. In more recent macOS releases, the new(er) full screen mode works more like maximise does on Windows, and has now taken over the green button on the menu bar for most apps, so the old zoom feature is more obscure than ever.
- gatonegro 5y ago
  Thanks, I honestly was not aware that "adjust window to content" is (or used to be) the intended behaviour. I saw apps that did it over the years, but I remember it being inconsistent even from one Apple app to the next. I also want to say that I remember Apple changing the green button to a maximise-like function, though I can't remember during which release that happened. Probably when they introduced virtual desktops and full screen apps. Of course, UX guidelines can only do so much without developers following them. That explains why the green button is so unpredictable. You never know if it'll do full screen, resize the window, maximise, or just ignore you.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Well you ought to be able to distinguish “Zoom” and “Full Screen” because the icon within the window control will be a plus symbol if it’s Zoom and two arrows pointing at 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock if it’s full screen. By default it’s full screen now, and you have to hold option to bring the Zoom control up (which since the advent of full screen is inconsistent even in Apple’s own apps). Double clicking the title bar (in the decreasing amount of empty space in modern Mac OS X chrome) will also net you Zoom functionality without holding option.
    - gatonegro 5y ago
      Interesting! I don't think I noticed that before. I got used to just doing Cmd+Ctrl+F to do full screen, or manually resize windows. Probably not ideal, but it felt consistent at least.
- Maursault 5y ago
  You missed a nice feature absent in Windows afaik, which is that the last state of the window is remembered and recalled by hitting the green button a second time.

mort96 5y ago

That first point is especially weird I thought. The author writes: "unlike other DWMs Finder can be killed completely", but I've killed explorer.exe on Windows many times and achieved the same effect as he's getting from killing Finder. I don't know where he's getting this idea that Finder can be killed but Explorer is unkillable. And yeah, almost everything else is either "it's not Windows" or minor but valid annoyances. A bit disappointing, since there's a lot of big problems to complain about which aren't mentioned.

bitigchi 5y ago

> (some) of the spatial behaviour of the Finder. In fact, there is a horde of macOS users begging to have full Spatial Finder back.

dolni 5y ago

mikl 5y ago
We’re talking about macOS here. Your complaints about hardware features have little to do with this discussion. Macs still have headphone jacks, too.
- dolni 5y ago
  Well you can replace the USB ports and a headphone jack by "breaking third-party MDM features" if you care THAT much about differentiating between the operating system and hardware (not that you should, because they're the same damn company). MDM features, like USB ports, are way more important that esoteric keybinds from the 1980s. > Macs still have headphone jacks, too. Oh, by Apple's grace, I am so thankful! Don't worry. This isn't a piety test.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

>There’s a long history behind some of these things. macOS UI conventions stretch all the way back to macOS 1.0, released in 1984. maybe some of those conventions are outdated The main gripe i have with macOS, for a company so focused on accessibility it's disappointing the lack of UI scaling options. You really can't do much compared to Windows. Linux also suck at this in terms of the basic options available.

SllX 5y ago
> maybe some of those conventions are outdated If you want to make this case, you have to make it on a case-by-case basis. It isn’t sufficient to say something is outdated, you have to make the case as to why it is worth changing now. They got a lot right in the original Macintosh, and they refined what they had a lot throughout the entire Classic and Mac OS X eras.