Finder is garbage compared to Windows Explorer. OS hotkey navigation is much better on Windows and GNOME/KDE/Fluxbox/xmonad. (I actually miss using xmonad; it was soooo good at this.) Office applications (still very real in a lot of environments) are mostly awful on the Mac. iTerm2 is fine, but I prefer PuTTY. Starting applications by their binary name with WIN + R is better (for me) than trying to find them within Spotlight. There are other little enhancements that I prefer Windows over to OS X, but I'm not remembering them right now.
I also hate the new MacBook keyboards. They take "getting used to," i.e. typing "lighter" than I'm accustomed to. Also, not having USB-A ports and requiring a 90W USB-C to USB-C power brick (i.e. not being able to charge the thing from common chargers, the most lucrative reason for using USB-C, for me) is garbage.
The one thing I like about OS X is that it's a BSD with GNU utilities built in. The thing that I don't like is that it's not a Linux and many of the dev environments I've worked in run on Linux, especially now in the age of Docker. While that's good news in that it forces me to do almost everything within Docker, it's bad whenever I need to maintain parity for whatever reason.
Odd I find hotkeys much better on Mac. They follow a more logical predictable pattern and are much more standarized. E.g. what is the standard windows hotkey for getting info/properties of an object. Never found one.
Also if an app doesn’t have configuration of hotkeys you are screwed. On Mac hotkey config is OS wide.
The command console experience on windows is horrible.
Office apps are better on Mac. Pages, numbers and keynote offer me a totally superior experience. The ribbon interface on Windows is a disaster. You spend too much tome hunt around among a zillion incompethensible icons.
In fact I do GUI design at work and use MS Office as an example of how to NOT design a UI.
Not sure why you complain about Finder. You got plenty of alternatives on Mac. I use Terminal and Finder a lot in combination and they interact with each other a lot better than on Windows. E.g. does windows have an “open” command yet?
The Mac environment takes some getting used to, it took me years to learn all the little details, like if you select a bunch of folders and double-click, it will open all of them. To close them all, option-click the close button.
I do find Finder to be inferior to explorer in almost every way. That tree pane on the left is too useful.
I'm far more of a Mac user, but I use Windows, too, and I agree that the Finder is quite inferior to Win Explorer. The simplest, most obvious things, such as having 2 side-by-side trees for file organization, or right-click on anything and create a new folder there--things that are easy and obvious--are NEVER going to come to Finder, which occasionally adds trivial eye candy such as "album flow" views or colored "tags", but basic workaday functionality, no.
Yes, you can buy a 3rd party replacement with the hassle of deploying and maintaining on multiple machines, if you have them, but my main complaint is what decades of not caring about the most fundamental of all Mac apps (the only one you can't quit) implies about Apple's strategic attitude toward the Mac overall.
For those of us who find the Mac the best pro dev platform, the implications are not good, because what we tend to like about it (desktop unix where all the client stuff just works) is just a historical accident that Apple would not create again and does not intend to maintain longer than necessary.
Rather than make the Finder more powerful to make the Mac better for serious users, Jobs took the approach that people who couldn't understand the difference between a file and a folder were the real market for Apple, solving the problem by creating iOS with no user view of the file system at all.
This turn from computer company to fashion accessory for those who don't care about computers per se was so successful as a business strategy that I can hardly criticize it. It just bodes ill for those of us who like the Mac for features its only supplier wants to be rid of.
Each time Apple has an event where Cook pointedly emphasizes that the iPad is "what we at Apple see as the future of computing", I google for an update on the current state of "best desktop Linux distro".
On OSX you can create a new folder with Command+Option+N. As for the side-by-side trees, I don't understand what you mean, I usually have 2 Finder windows open, then drag and drop as needed.
When I transitioned from Windows to Mac, 13 years ago, I needed some adaptation time, especially with Finder, but in the end I found it powerful. The main issue coming from Windows Explorer is that basic Explorer workflows such as copypasting don't have a Finder equivalent.
As I said, Windows lets you put a new folder (as well as various types of new documents) in any part of the tree that you right-click, while Mac's cmd-opt-n is limited to the root of the folder you're looking at. And having to separately position two windows that have/lose focus independently and can have one come to the front without the other is ridiculous compared to having both trees side by side in the same window like Win Explorer and every 3rd-party Finder replacement on the Mac.
Having been a Finder user since my 128K Mac in spring, 1984, I've had adequate time to get used to an application that hasn't improved in even the most obvious ways for going on two decades. It's fossilware.
Must be something about a particular way you are working. I have never experienced this as a problem.
Why would losing focus on one window be a problem?
Why would you need to create all these directories in multiple parts of the tree?
I can't quite comprehend what sort of work flow of work you do which require these things?
Perhaps I don't see it because I use the Finder and Terminal a lot together. I don't use one exclusively for very long periods.
But I am curious what you're workflow is like, because I see a lot of Finder hate, but don't really get what people's problem are, and how they are using Finder which is causing them so much problems.
Sounds more like you are not familiar enough with using a Mac. Putting two finder windows next to each other is easy, and so is quickly creating a directory.
Finder also supports tree view you know. OTOH does windows have as good filtering tools, smart folders, labels etc?
Option-Click to close is a novelty to me and a very handy one at that... the number of times I’ve accidentally shot myself in the foot by selecting and accidentally opening maybe hundreds of folders is not something I’ve kept count of, but it’s definitely happened multiple times. I’ve been using OS X (now macOS) intensively since 2002 and I’ve come to think of myself as a “Power User”, but I’ve never known of the option-close trick. Thanks.
What? As much as I'd like for the Excel dominance to end, I can't see how anyone would ever work quicker in Numbers over Excel for any work that takes more than an hour a month. The ribbon interface offers shortcuts to pretty much every single function through the keyboard in an interactive way. I can't say the same about Numbers.
What exactly is it you do in Excel which is quicker than Numbers?
Numbers excel at what a spreadsheet application should be about. Once you get very complex sheets you are much better off using more specialized software such as DataGraph, R, Julia, Matlab, Numpy, SAS
Finder is garbage compared to Windows Explorer. OS hotkey navigation is much better on Windows and GNOME/KDE/Fluxbox/xmonad. (I actually miss using xmonad; it was soooo good at this.) Office applications (still very real in a lot of environments) are mostly awful on the Mac. iTerm2 is fine, but I prefer PuTTY. Starting applications by their binary name with WIN + R is better (for me) than trying to find them within Spotlight. There are other little enhancements that I prefer Windows over to OS X, but I'm not remembering them right now.
I also hate the new MacBook keyboards. They take "getting used to," i.e. typing "lighter" than I'm accustomed to. Also, not having USB-A ports and requiring a 90W USB-C to USB-C power brick (i.e. not being able to charge the thing from common chargers, the most lucrative reason for using USB-C, for me) is garbage.
The one thing I like about OS X is that it's a BSD with GNU utilities built in. The thing that I don't like is that it's not a Linux and many of the dev environments I've worked in run on Linux, especially now in the age of Docker. While that's good news in that it forces me to do almost everything within Docker, it's bad whenever I need to maintain parity for whatever reason.