Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one

Finder is frustrating but this guy is just complaining about the fact that he's unable to organize his own files into directories in a way that lets him find them later. He then calls himself a power user. Finder even has tags to help with this, which is more than most operating systems get

Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.

The deciders for me, in case you're interested:

- Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.

- Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.

- Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.

I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)

Thinly veiled marketing post.

I've had to use Finder, and it's definitely frustrating in a "Think Different" sort of way, but this article doesn't actually mention why beyond vague statements.

Here's a concrete one: Enter enters rename mode.

Finder is indeed frustrating. "Recent" seems like an attempt to fix this without the need to use some giant camera roll?

The (hard) problem is that almost every finder alternative/add-on I've tried is someone else's ideal workflow that still doesn't sit well with me. I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons.

Both work marginally better (for me) when used in concert with the quick-find tools like Alfred (or Spotlight) and KRunner. None of these are perfect.

Showerthought: maybe the "find files" interfaces aren't the worst offenders; maybe it's the "place files" workflows that are problematic and we're trying to solve the wrong problem?

My most recent laptop purchase was a Macbook Pro, because the price/performance is just so lopsided with the price of memory pushing everything up to Apple-like prices, it didn't make sense to buy an x86 laptop. But, coming from Linux it's a miserable user experience. I genuinely hate macOS. Every time I use it, I'm surprised by some weird thing about it, some limitation, some annoyance, some weird bug. Installing software is ridiculous. And, yes, Finder is weird for the sake of being weird.

I simply don't understand how Apple has the reputation it has.

Wow. I'm a Linux user and I have to use Mac for some work related tasks. I genuinely hate Finder and was going to lean back and enjoy reading this article.

This went into a direction I didn't expect at all.

In the end, it turns out for me that the classic explorer Tree View is the most intuitive. I know where things are as a sub-tree system. I get that hard links etc. complicate this and perhaps there are smart folders etc which do not fit this model well but I find I frequently want to “Go Up” in the hierarchy and this requires an uncomfortable shortcut on a Macbook (arrow key) or a menu button rather than a toolbar icon.

But these are complaints. The right answer is to see if I can build a file explorer for MacOS that behaves in the fashion I desire.