Donald Rumsfeld sez: “we fight with the Finder we have, not the Finder we want to have.”
Finder is the OS X file manager. It is essentially useless. Grievances against the Finder range from the aesthetic (brushed metal; ugly colored labels) to its oddball interaction design (modal icon, list, or column views; unsound importance of the oval toolbar button) to technical (lack of recovery from a disconnected network share; .DS_Store file pollution). This is just a random sampling; any Mac person will have his or her own list of questionable Finder behaviors.
Over the last few releases of OS X, Finder has changed, but it hasn’t improved: hence FTFF, a slogan coined at Ars Technica.
If you don’t want to wait for Apple to fix the Finder, there are some alternatives (from best to worst):
- muCommander — an excellent open source Norton Commander style file manager, cross-platform yet reasonably Mac-like;
- Liquifile — a clean zooming interface that works best with deeply hierarchical directory structures ($10 USD);
- Learn bash;
- Finder, with icons arranged in a sine wave; or
- Path Finder — a bulky, overcomplicated proprietary Finder clone, not recommended ($35 USD).
For everyday work, I use Finder in column view, with four columns and a floating information palette (⌥⌘I) as the “fifth column.” For anything more complicated, find and xargs are starting points.
Air. Water. UNIX. » ZFS and Leopard | 15-Dec-06 at 1:32 pm | Permalink
[...] More on Leopard coming later. But I’m already enjoying the fact that Samba shares mount INSTANTLY and with no fanfare. I use an alias in my .bashrc that calls smbclient and connects to a Samba daemon on my LAN. The millisecond that I hit Enter for my alias, mountgnubox, the server icon appears on the Desktop. I do not know how this could possibly get any more perfect. Waking from sleep, the shares automatically reconnect before I can even get the lid of my MacBook Pro all the way up. Yes. If the system doesn’t complain when the share can’t be found on the network, then one of the major reasons for FTFF is gone. [...]
Air. Water. UNIX. » xar in Leopard | 31-Dec-06 at 5:25 pm | Permalink
[...] People get excited about a possible new UI in Leopard or the hope that Apple may yet FTFF, but it’s the things like this that really get me excited. [...]
Brian Kerr | Single window mode (purple title bar button) in OS X Previews | 30-Jun-07 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
[...] The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge: you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, as the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing. [...]
$ cat /dev/brain > /dev/blog » The Data Loss Bug in OS X caught me | 08-Nov-07 at 7:19 am | Permalink
[...] to have discovered that problem in the first place or at least made it public) wrote: Apple, please FTFF [...]