[dahart]

So true, this is a bizarre choice that tells the user that renaming a folder is more important and more frequent than navigating. It makes keyboard navigating in the Finder pretty annoying (unless you only live in column view, which feels very claustrophobic to me). IMO the Finder has a bunch of bad UX, it’s like they never figured out what to do with it during the OSX transition, and then refused to improve it or do anything to it to change old behavior or take it closer to what any other OSes had done.

[D13Fd]

All it means is that to rename you press enter, and to open you press command-o. It works perfectly fine for keyboard navigation.

After using both for a long time (Windows for 30 years (!) and Mac OS for 16), I actually like the Mac OS way a bit better. In my usage renaming is a very common operation and I don't have F keys on my usual keyboard (renaming in Windows is F2).

[dahart]

I don't disagree with your opinion, there's nothing wrong with liking command-o for nav.

But what I mean is that Finder navigating uses an unintuitive key chord you have to learn, while renaming uses a single key, and a large and very common/obvious/intuitive one. This does in fact mean the UX is declaring which one they expect to be more common. I'm not saying renaming is uncommon, but for me it's nowhere near the usage of navigating into a folder. Are you saying you're renaming folders more often than browsing into them? (How do you get to the folder you want to rename?)

Both Windows and Linux GUI folder browsers use the Enter key to navigate, and so do many other tree browser UIs including our web browsers. It's very common and very reasonable to expect Enter to navigate to the thing you've selected. This expectation and ecosystem of navigating this way means that Mac's Finder stands out as different and unintuitive, even within a Mac-only set of applications. I love my Mac, and I've also used both Windows and Mac since they first existed ... both for 35 years. But today's Finder is definitely weird and anachronistic compared nearly all other modern file browsers.