Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SlackSabbath 450 days ago
As somebody who recently had to switch to Mac for work, my experience has been the exact opposite of this. Every other OS I've used since Windows 95 I've been able to get to grips with the same way: start off using the mouse to find my way around the UI, and introduce keyboard shortcuts as and when I find them useful. Eventually I get to the point of being able to use either exclusively keyboard or exclusively mouse for most tasks.

MacOS seems to _require_ some unergonomic combination of both from the get go. Some basic things are easy with the keyboard but hard/impossible with the mouse and vice versa. The Finder app doesn't even have a button to go 'up' a directory for god's sake.
2 comments
wpm 449 days ago
Right click the window title and you get a drop down navigation menu of every folder in the hierarchy up to the "/Volumes/$VOLUME" the folder is on.

I'd kill for this on Windows or any mainstream Linux DE.

link
cosmic_cheese 450 days ago
It helps to keep in mind where the OS and its core user base is coming from.

For the case of the up button for example, prior to OS X the Finder was a spacial file manager where each folder had a single corresponding window that remembered its position on screen, allowing users to rely on spacial memory to quickly navigate filesystems. Its windows didn’t even have toolbars, because they weren’t navigator windows — every time you opened a folder you got a new window (unless that folder’s window was already open, in which case it was foregrounded).

So when OS X rolls around in ~2000 and switches the Finder to navigator windows, they’re looking at what existing users will find familiar. Back/forward is easy since most had used a web browser by that point and map cleanly to most people’s mental models (“I want to go back”), but up? That’s a lot more rare. A handful of folks who’d used an FTP client might’ve been familiar with the concept, but few outside of that few would’ve, and how “up” relates to a filesystem is not in any way obvious. And so, the Finder never got an up button, just a key shortcut because anybody advanced enough to be hunting down shortcuts is going to understand the notion of “up” in a filesystem.

link