Technology

Sidebar defaults are bad. There's no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can't see the file system's structure in Finder. The GUI doesn't have a way to go "up" in the directory structure. I don't think you can do it in the GUI alone.

It won't let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don't know how to open stuff in places like that without cd'ing to the location in the terminal, and doing open . in the desired directory.

The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It's also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.

I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn't want to cooperate. If I do find the file I'm looking for, and want the full path, it doesn't want to give it. I don't even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> "new iterm2 tab here" -> pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.

Contrast with windows' default explorer. It's not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there's the "my pc", click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.

Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows' Explorer. Had no complaints about it.