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> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's

> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.

chungy 4y ago
Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged inside them however you want to leave them without necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or anything like that. There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files. But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chungy 4y ago
    I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your file browser was also your document manager was also your application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows never really supported it (depending on one's view of Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I once briefly heavily used it.) Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.
    - alexdbird 4y ago
      I think along the same lines, well, not the living in a terminal bit, but have worked with people who would probably be described as neurodiverse that absolutely hated files moving from the order they'd left them in. Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.
      - another2another 4y ago
        >I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though. I definitely do, as I find makes it quicker to find stuff as project grows in size. The behaviour of Finder in MacOS (7.1 was my first version) of remembering the position of folders & files I never found that helpful, and in particular it made working on other peoples' machines really hard since you constantly wanted to clean-up or reorder to what made sense to you but didn't want to mess with their preferences (or their particular personal chaos, as it sometimes was).
- scarface74 4y ago
  I just happen to know that John Siracusa has been talking about it for two decades https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ And an HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12484241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12484241

chungy 4y ago

Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.

WorldMaker 4y ago
Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged inside them however you want to leave them without necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or anything like that. There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files. But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chungy 4y ago
  I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your file browser was also your document manager was also your application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows never really supported it (depending on one's view of Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I once briefly heavily used it.) Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.
  - alexdbird 4y ago
    I think along the same lines, well, not the living in a terminal bit, but have worked with people who would probably be described as neurodiverse that absolutely hated files moving from the order they'd left them in. Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.
    - another2another 4y ago
      >I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though. I definitely do, as I find makes it quicker to find stuff as project grows in size. The behaviour of Finder in MacOS (7.1 was my first version) of remembering the position of folders & files I never found that helpful, and in particular it made working on other peoples' machines really hard since you constantly wanted to clean-up or reorder to what made sense to you but didn't want to mess with their preferences (or their particular personal chaos, as it sometimes was).
scarface74 4y ago
I just happen to know that John Siracusa has been talking about it for two decades https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ And an HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12484241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12484241