[BakaRakuda]

A lot of these just seem like you aren't familiar with the Finder, did you check the menus, preferences, or do a web search for Finder tips?

- No folder tree you are correct. I don't miss it personally. Gotta just deal with this one I think.

- What way specifically does the search not work for you? It's incredibly powerful and you can search by file name, content, file type, creation date, etc.

- It should save the window size you last set it as on a per folder basis when you open a new window from a location. Don't really have any troubles with how it works personally.

- Finder has tabs. Command+T

- Not 100% clear on the problem exactly. If you're going into the wrong folder you don't just have to select a folder by the first character, just keep typing and it will jump to the matching folder name in a list.

- File -> Make Alias

- This one is a bit unclear too. Use spring loaded folders, or a new tab in the location you want to drop to or add the folder to the sidebar that you want to drop files to. Cut and Paste with same named files is a lot better than it used to be and basically works fine now, IMO.

- View -> Show Preview

- Indeed it is designed to keep people away from the system files. 95% of people shouldn't be in there. And of the remaining 1% most of them shouldn't either even if they think otherwise. :P

If you actually need to muck in the system files you can toggle their display in the Finder via a terminal command.

- Command + Up Arrow to go up a directory

- You can open a directory in the terminal easily in a number of ways, including dragging and dropping the folder into the terminal window or icon, using the services menu, etc.

- I don't really find drag and drop copying to be slow in general, are you on a spinning HDD? Anyway with High Sierra the new APFS will make copying files instantaneous.

- There are various services you can use or you can create your own automator services, folder actions etc. to do a multitude of things.

- Finder is decently clutter free IMO, AND it can do a lot of sophisticated things as well.

[someone7x]

I'm not GP, but I recently sank time into trying to change Finder searches to default to the current directory instead of my entire machine. It mildly infuriates me that I can't change this; I gave up after I saw com.apple.finder.plist is not plaintext.

[comex]

Plist files have two standard encodings, an XML-based textual one and a binary one. You can use plutil to convert between the two, e.g.

    plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.Finder.plist

However, for preferences you probably want to use the `defaults` command instead, because IIRC they’re managed by a daemon (cfprefsd) that might not notice if you modify the backing files while it’s running.

[concede_pluto]

When someone decides a config file needs two different serializations and a daemon, I'm reminded of https://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html.

[comex]

The two different encodings aren't just for config files; property lists are used throughout the OS for all sorts of things. They're a serialization of standard data structures such as arrays and dictionaries: same idea as JSON, decades before JSON. In retrospect, the XML-based text format is excessively verbose, but back then XML was all the hotness… As for the binary format, well, even given JSON's relative succinctness, there are many different formats that attempt to fill the role of 'binary JSON' (BSON, BJSON, JSON-B, MessagePack, CBOR, UBJSON, Fleece, PSON). It's just that none of them have become ubiquitous, probably because of some combination of fragmentation and the lack of built-in browser support.

As for the daemon, among other benefits, it allows preference changes to be immediately visible across all processes on the system, rather than requiring manual action to reload from disk. See:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Dat...

[kitsunesoba]

Default search scope is an option in the Finder's preferences window and has been ever since 10.7...

[stuntkite]

Thanks for your point for point response mate. I'm going to take a look at all of it.

Sorry for the points that were unclear. They are general frustrations that I've had. This looks like it'll help with a lot!