Comment by thrdbndndn
10 months ago
> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for.
This rings especially true with Windows.
There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs.
This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to excessive animations and performance issues. Explorer in particular has become barely usable for anyone who frequently manages files.
Apple can stay far ahead simply by not falling even faster than Windows. Finder and Spotlight have gotten worse, but they remain light-years ahead of their Windows counterparts.
Ummmm, what? Spotlight I'll grant you, but Finder is hands down the worst file browser on any operating system.
There's no up button, no split screen, you can't copy a path easily, you can't show hidden files easily, you can't customize the columns in list mode, the column mode won't let you go up, there's no cut and paste.
Windows Explorer sucks, but not nearly as bad as finder. Dolphin, thunar, and Nautilus on Linux have all those features and more. I have to drop to terminal or install mucommander just to do basic things in the macOS filesystem.
Finder always felt like it was built with usecases and workflows in mind that had no intersection with my own.
Luckily there are Norton commander clones available for osx.
> There's no up button
Display the path bar at the bottom and you can get to any level of parent in 1 click. Without the path bar you can also right-click on the current folder name at the top of the window to also navigate to any level of parent.
> no split screen
This is not something I've ever found a use for in any OS, I always just open 2 windows. It does have tabs, and you can drags stuff between tabs, albeit with some delay. This seems minor, unless for very specific workflows.
> you can't copy a path easily
Right-click file or folder, when you then press Option, Copy changes to copy path.
> you can't show hidden files easily
Command+Shift+. toggles hidden files on and off. I find this pretty easy to remember, since dots prefix hidden files.
> you can't customize the columns in list mode
Right-click the headings and you can add/remove the ones you want? Is that what you're talking about?
> there's no cut and paste
Instead of an option when copying, it's an option when pasting. Command+C to copy, then add Option while pasting... Command+Option+V. I almost never use Cut, even on Windows of Linux, I don't want to cut something, get interrupted, do something else, and lose my file. Having it move, then delete the source with the paste action, is safer.
It sounds like you haven't used Finder that much, or weren't willing to learn or adapt your behaviors.
There are some things about other file explorers I like, but I don't find myself struggling to use Finder at all. I mostly miss column view when I'm on anything that isn't Finder.
Yes, Apple Finder is so freaking slow, browsing a moderately large folder is challenging, nevermind a network share.
The last time I had a computer running MacOS, you couldn't even type the directory you were looking for into Finder; you had to use a dropdown menu.
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Not sure I even agree about spotlight. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but can never find what I’m looking for. Even when I’m in the directory, searching for a file in that directory. It’ll just show me random download files.
Granted, I haven’t even tried to use it in years. So maybe it’s not so bad these days?
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Going up is also a shortcut: CMD+arrow up.
I assume they didn't expect users to use directory hierarchies much and thought everybody would dump their files into flat dirs and search them with spotlight.
Try command + click on the folder in the top of the window to go up
Spotlight has been broken on both of my Macs since Sequoia. It doesn't find anything under Downloads dir even though it should be indexed. Or any non-Apple apps under Applications. Re-indexing did nothing.
TBF a ton of windows users aren't primarily from the platform, and have either a second machine or more experience on other OSes.
The dev community might be an outlier, but people choosing a windows machine to get WSL on a mainstream and well-supported hardware is not uncommon.
Same for those with a macos work laptop but a windows gaming machine, or artists using a mac for personal stuff and windows for 3D/2D creation.
Having Windows designers making platform transitions easier kinda makes sense, though I agree it shouldn't penalize existing users as much as it does now.
> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for.
> This rings especially true with Windows.
Just take a look at the Windows 11 "Control Panel" or whatever is called and how that looks like just another UI on top of the main system, that does not make sense
I don't disagree, but the average business user is someone who uses the M365 suite and a handful of webapps. We are getting ready to roll it out and our test users haven't had many complaints. IT is a different story, however, for the reasons you stated. It's like they just shuffled all the system and config menus for fun.
As far I remember, Microsoft design team used Sketch, which is... mac only.
Now they are using Figma, but as far I know, yeah, they all use macs lol
Can you upload a video showing exactly what you mean by explorer is sluggish?
Context menu alone takes a few hundreds milliseconds to load every time. And then you have the infamous "show more options" to click if you want to do most of things (in my use case).
Open a folder isn't much faster either, there is visible delay. with the current-day hardware there is no reason why this isn't instant.
Compare it with Windows XP or Windows 7, the difference is night and day.
Interaction with OneDrive is horrible too, this is particularly bad because it was fine on Win10. When a folder is syncing it constantly "refreshes" itself which causes you to lose the focus if you're renaming files. This is the single most annoying thing because I do close a doc -> immediately rename it all the time.
Something went way wrong around IIRC Vista.
I still had spinning rust when I upgraded. Win7 was fine. UI wasn't quite as snappy as XP, but it still felt pretty responsive.
After upgrading? EVERYTHING took forever. The friggin' start menu lagged noticeably on almost every interaction.
Upgrading to a solid state disk mostly fixed it, so they had clearly done something foundational that'd radically increased disk IO system wide. Solid state's fast, but it's not fast enough, if they'd kept going down that road. Eventually it'd start to show up there, too.
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It’s comforting knowing that I’m not the only one being driven crazy by the renaming file focus thing. Now when I paste a file and go to rename, I wait and watch the focus selection switch 3 times before I know I’m good to type
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this isn't a video. I specifically asked for a video. so i'll make one, and you show me where the sluggishness is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_t8SUwrEk
you'll note that, apparently, everything you said prior to your last paragraph is shown incorrect.
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(not OP) I open the “videos” folder and it takes 10 seconds to show the files list (there’s only like 50 files). I tried various forum solutions (whose existence proves it’s a bug) and nothing worked. Only happens on the videos folder.
Have you tried searching with Explorer? Or opening the start menu or a folder? I'm currently 100% a Windows shop, and it's embarrassingly slow on my silly fast computer.
To be fair, searching with Spotlight has been equally slow and useless for me… Whenever I need to find a file and mistakenly use Command F in my Finder, the complete cessation of activity that inevitably results reminds me yet once again to just go to my terminal to use trusty GNU’s find instead.
"Everything.exe"
but more to the point you have to enable indexing and let the indexing service run. Microsoft caught flak for "SearchIndexer.exe" using 25% of a CPU 24/7 that i think it's much less aggressive now. But i don't use that search because windows searches CIFS shares slowly, too. Everything.exe indexes and the searches are near enough instant that it's not even worth splitting hairs or stopwatch timers.