Why does Finder SUCK???

[HeliAnimal]

I hear so many people on here complain about Finder and how bad it is. I've only been using a mac for less than a year. I haven't noticed anything horrible with it. Can someone fill me in on the down-sides? What needs to be fixed?

[nixgeek]

Well, you have to understand that a lot of us come from way before OS X and back then every part of the Finder was consistent. Menus, functions, look-and-feel,....everything. Now with the Mac OS X Finder (and more so in Panther and Tiger), there are inconsistencies especially when you tell the Finder to remember certain settings. It doesn't do it all around even when you tell it to. It seems that Apple has gotten a bit slack with it's own Human Interface Guidelines, and let's not even talk about some third party developers. Hopefully this will change with Leopard if Apple has listened to its userbase.

[Mikuro]

Just a few very quick things, because I don't want to get into a big rant (it's one of those rare occasions ):

The Finder insists on forcing its metal mode on me under seemingly random circumstances. After years of wrestling with it, yes, I can finally predict when it will open with metal and when it will respect my wishes. But it's complicated. Very complicated. And there is NO WAY (AFAIK) to get CD windows to appear with the aqua mode.

The underlying cause of the metal-aqua confusion is that in OS X, folders are no longer tied to their windows. You can have a folder open in a dozen different windows, each with their own views. Which view options will "stick"? And under what circumstances? Well...it depends. It is certainly not intuitive or simple.

File search in Tiger is awful. Just...awful. Spotlight is riddled with bugs, and the Finder's implementation of Spotlight is hackish, weak, difficult to use, and even buggier than it needs to be given the core of Spotlight. (Panther's search was a dream in comparison.) Furthermore, there's no easy way to search the contents of a folder. If I want to do that, I need to first switch to metal mode, then enter a search term to magically change my folder window to a search results window (!?) which will have the options I need. By default, the new search results window is NOT limited to the folder, as I obviously want it to be, but to my whole disk, or the last place I searched, or who-knows-what. As with the metal-vs-aqua problem, this is not consistent, not simple, and just not predictable to any normal person.

File-application linking is handled in many different ways. Not all of them are smart. I'm already ranting too much, so I'll leave details for another day.

There's no way to get a new folder to be created in list view. Until OS X, the Finder was smart enough to make new folders inherit all the view options of their parent. But again, OS X tries to sever that folder-window connection (albeit inconsistently...which really just makes things more confusing...), so I guess this was deemed impossible at some point and nobody ever revisited it. *sigh*

The icon grid is ridiculously large. It makes icon view a chore to use. The classic Finder had a 32x32-pixel icon grid. Yes, with file names you could not REALLY put your icons that close together, but it didn't matter. It was smart enough to use the space sensibly. OS X forces a 128x128 grid, and this doesn't change with the icon size you specify. And when you change the icon size of a window, chances are your icon arrangement will be ruined.

Speaking of the icon grid, it constantly gets "jostled", suddenly making my neatly-arranged icons non-aligned. This happens all the time when you drag files from one window to another, especially if scrolling is involved. And the Finder's "clean up" command never seems to just shift everything back over; it always throws icons into seemingly-random places, sometimes not even respecting the width of the window.

The green expand box is very buggy. Try this: Click the expand box in a window, then move an icon slightly outside its bounds. Click it again. Did it expand to fit all the icons again? No! It reverted to the last size. The same thing happens in list view when you resize columns. (Edit: I actually just tried this and it worked as it should in icon view, although not list view. I know the problem exists in icon view as well, but I guess that's not the way to consistently reproduce it.)

And of course, it's missing a lot of features from the OS 8/9 Finder, like pop-up windows, and non-drag-based spring-loaded folders.

Okay, I ended up ranting a bit more than I wanted. I just can't help it, I guess...

[macbri]

Awww, I got to the end and was ready to type "what, that wasn't a rant?". Ah well, can't win 'em all

[knight885]

That explains why I can never find all "thumbs.db" files when copying Windows folders over - the Search doesn't work.

I agree with Mikuro, Finder is counter-intuitive, inconsistent, and inappropriately-named. Windows Explorer is the same - why is one of the most important OS functions written so badly?

Someone needs to port Directory Opus to OSX.

[ora]

Originally Posted by knight885

Someone needs to port Directory Opus to OSX.

Lots of people swear by Path Finder, you might like to try that.

[fryke]

My guess is that, sadly, Apple intends to - instead of fixing the Finder - make much more use of Spotlight as some sort of replacement. If so, that's probably one of the worst decisions ever to come out of Cupertino...

[wraith]

All I care about is :

1) Better than Windows Explorer? YES
2) Let's me navigate the file system? YES

Finder is fine. I think only old-school Mac OS 9 and lower users have problems with Finder. (They also had/have problems with the Dock.) Coming from a Linux world, after coming from a Windows world, Mac OSX was the perfect solution for me because it's based on UNIX. I never liked the Mac OS until Mac OSX so I have none of the "I'm used to this, so the new stuff sucks" complaints. (Not that old school Mac OS users don't have valid complaints, I just don't have them because I didn't come from there.)