I don’t think it could have disappointed Windows users more than the last release of Windows. 
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Aai, Rayz. I’ve moved to Mac, but there are still many advantages to Windows. The flexibility of File Explorer, to name one. Let’s not go Windows bashing.
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To each his own. 
What can it do that Mac Finder can’t do.
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It doesn’t have an inherent opening keyboard shortcut, whereas Win+E has you flying to where you want to go from day 1 on any machine.
I find cmd-space f i n will find the Finder on any machine… It’s just a different more generic way of achieving the same thing, neither better nor worse than on Windows.
The Spotlight shortcut is one of the first things I would teach anyone new to Macs – that and cmd-shift ? for the menu search bar.
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I don’t know, in my opinion both Finder and File Explorer are not very good, but the sort of thing you would expect from a corporation making software for “everyone”.
Third-party file managers are where it is at, or even just the shell.
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⌥⌘space
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Somehow or other I don’t think this will convince me that I should go back to WIN, I can not imagine a use case scenario. Maybe when the latte macchiato kicks in , the ingeniousness of WIN+E will dawn on me and I will install a Win machine on a VM just to experience the thrill of it all.
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What are some suggestions along with use case scenarios that would make a person interested to try them? So far my humble needs are satisfied by “Finder” and “Spotlight search,” but who knows there may be a use out there that I didn’t know was crucial to my existence and that I can’t live without.
Scrivener is a powerhouse, but I probably use only 20% of the features, the ones that matter to me, but I know that if I need more capability, it probably exists already in Scrivener and i just have to ask or search. The same with most other software, like MS Word, or the multitude of Adobe products.
But out of curiosity I would like to know other options are out their and what they can do that the current default tools can not do. Hopefully I may find something that sparks a εύρηκα moment.
What’s the shortcut to offload all the MacApps? I’m still happy with M365 on Mac. A few irritations, but workable.
Please excuse my obtuseness, having left the MS workspace years ago, what do you mean by your statement and why is it an important must-have feature?
This seems to be an ambivalent statement covering all bases.
Glad to see that the original thread has been pruned. Let’s summarize that thread: the new L&L writing product has been used on Mac for the past three years. It hasn’t been released because the MacOS is a moving target and so is Windows. Old timers may remember that it took a while to get the Windows version of Scrivener out the door. Then there are business reasons. Would the new produt vannibalize Scrivener sales? No one has talked about that.
Now, somehow we’re on File Managers and Windows v. Mac. So let’s throw in some chaos: Is there a better file mnagers than Xtree? Or its rewrite, ytree? I think there’s a ytree version for Linux. No word processor was bettr than Worderfect, btw. Is there a desktop searcg search program as good as X1 for windows? (p/j/a yagoo desktop search) Or a cross-platform photo app as good as Picasa?
Well, for example, Forklift, a dual pane file manager, which not only makes moving files around on your local system much easier, but also, if you have a website for instance, it can connect to the server and upload files by FTP, etc.
Yes, you can open two Finder windows to move files, and you can use Transmit or Cyberduck to FTP to servers, but just as Scrivener makes writing more productive by bringing research etc. into one app-window, Forklift does the same for file management.
Mark
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If we were worried about that, we wouldn’t be developing the new app. We certainly haven’t thrown person-years of effort into it just to write it off. (We’re not Warner Bros.!)
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I think a very simple way of putting the potential appeal is to extrapolate what I left unsaid in my original comment. Everyone-Software has to play it safe and use established conventions when it comes to core system stuff. Sure they might add a few frills here and there (oh wow, tabs, you absolute party animal) but you’re going to get extremely traditional approaches to file management because it’s a fairly core thing about your computer, and you need as many people as possible to be on the same page.
Third-party developers can try new things more easily, or follow models that may not be as popular and understood, but are in fact decades old, tried and tested ways of doing things.
File Management Models
Dual-pane file managers
One example that could be used along those lines comes from my own personal preferences: dual-pane file managers. To clarify the level of that preference, I would say it goes quite deep, into how you prefer to have windows organised on your screen and work within them. It’s not just a list of features or things you can do with X but not Y, but that for me, dual-pane file management is natural feeling, while sidebar+browser windows always felt like a clunky and very mouse-heavy mess to work with.
But I would say there are solid advantages to this model worth describing. Any Scrivener user will get the basic concept: one can navigate to two different locations in vertical split views and then offering some integration between them.
Where file managers go with that idea is to make those splits work together seamlessly for tasks like moving or copying files between locations with single-key operations. For example, I can have Downloads open in the left split, and some deeply nested project folder I’m gathering materials for in the right. The new file lands in the Downloads folder, I select it, and hit F6 (or something) to move it to the other split (the project folder). Similar to how Scrivener works, with each split having its own history queue, I can even work between a recent handful of folders without having to reset navigation, or have a whole bunch of windows all over the screen. Tools like this tend to sport tabs for each split as well, greatly increasing the “workspace” beyond two folders, as well.
That basic concept can scale into more useful and interesting cases, such as archive format browsing and selective extraction from it, even inline editing if the format supports it, or the building of archives from a selection of files in one split, to be stored in the other. File Explorer already offers seamless archive browsing, but without the dual pane approach, actually working with them feels clunky to me in the same way working with multiple folders at once does. (This is incidentally one of the things it does way better than Finder, which can only ever dump the entire contents of the archive into the file system as a new folder and then have you browse them and trash it later, even if all you wanted to do was look at one README file in it). In my case, I can not only browse the archive using all of the native file management muscle memory I’m used to, but edit the contents of it directly.
But, I do digress a little bit, as that capability is not unique to dual-pane browsing, it’s more the being able to pop the README file out of the archive individually into the target folder in the other split, and the maybe splicing in a couple of replacements from that folder later on, that dual-pane makes nice.
Dual-pane management is one of those ways of working that might gel with one after using it a bit, and after having done so, the whole multiple-windows-everywhere-with-sidebars approach, taken by both Finder and File Explorer, may begin to feel inefficient and not very economical about how much you can do on your screen at once.
Something a lot of dual-pane file managers provide (such as Forklift for Mac or Krusader for Linux) is to effortlessly handle remote locations in one of the splits, too. FTP servers, cloud clients, even S3 compatible storage, WebDav and so forth. If you do a lot of moving or copying stuff around between systems and servers, it means not having to fire up an entirely different program since neither Finder nor File Explorer really handle either of those tasks well at all. All of your muscle memory and habits from local file management are just as easily mapped to extracting error log files from your web host, or updating a bunch of zip file contents without having to do the whole Download+Extract+Update Files+Compress+Upload dance. Since you’re using your file manager to work with online resources, it also means your standard system file associations work for opening files, and the edits you make automatically go back up to the server.
Spatial file managers
As said at the top, that was one big thing for me. I kind of grew up on dual-pane file management, but worth a notable mention is that the only other model that ever really appealed to me was the classic Macintosh Finder’s spatial model where a folder is in all respects a window that forever remembers where you left it and how you display the files within it. There was no monobrowser window anywhere. If you opened “Preferences” it always loaded in the same place on the screen, where you last left it—it was impossible to display the contents of another folder in that window. They wanted the concept of a window and a folder to be one and the same, and like dual-pane, it’s kind of one of those things you just have to get a feel for before you can make a judgement on it. The modern OS X Finder sought to (somewhat poorly in my opinion) copy File Explorer’s sidebar + single-window-browser model, but like I said, I never liked that entire model at all. To be fair, Finder has a kind of spatial mode in that if you turn off the toolbar and sidebar then double-clicking on a folder loads it in a new window, and it kind of sort of remembers where you left it. But overall it’s very obviously a neglected and quite likely forgotten part of Finder that hasn’t seen any care in over twenty years. It doesn’t work well, and certainly doesn’t have the simplicity and elegance of the classic Finder from the '90s.
Useful features
Another person might have some other draw from a model I haven’t mentioned, or maybe even just a “killer feature”, that pulls them. Path Finder, another excellent Mac file manager, has piles of interesting features, and way back in the day that’s the only manager I used (it had a decent dual-pane mode too).
A selection of other random features I find indispensable, outside of the core design model itself:
- The ability to toggle a command line shell, to the current folder, on or off into a split view below the file listing. Shell just does some things better than a GUI, so being able to tap into that whenever you want without opening up a new shell window and getting the full path from your file manager somehow and getting it into the
cdcommand… well, it changes everything if you do a lot of that. - Simplified folder navigation: LeftArrow and RightArrow to ascend and descend the hierarchy. A small thing, but if you do a lot of it, it makes a notable difference in how something feels. Finder is closer here, with its modifier+arrow approach, over Explorer’s Enter+Backspace approach that is located further from the up/down arrow keys.
- Innate filtering: when I type in a listing view, it starts filtering the file listing by what I type (no clicking into toolbars, no shortcuts, no using a massive, expensive and bloated system-wide search engine just to fetch a list pattern matched off the text strings from the view right in front of me). Esc to cancel, arrow keys to select search results, right/left arrow keys to navigate out of search results. Such also provides for shell-like glob selection. Being able to, for example, type
.pdfthen hitCtrl+Ato select all of the results, andF6to shunt them over to the other working split. It’s another one of those things that once you use it, it makes so much sense and makes your life so much easier if you do a lot of file management. - One-tap toggling of whether or not hidden files are shown. For me, that’s essential. With Finder that takes researching the unsupported system setting and keying it on the shell, and then rebooting the file manager. Yikes. With File Explorer it’s a bit better, but still buried a little in settings, not something you can toggle with a hot key only when you need it.
- A simple shortcut or menu command to copy the path of the current folder, or the selected file(s) to the clipboard. That’s another thing I do a lot of, as I take notes on files in other programs and want to reference where they are. In Finder you have to drag and drop generally (and be careful not to drop into a place that takes file drops), and with Explorer you can get the current directory path easily enough with
Ctrl+L+Ctrl+C, but I recall getting the actual file path a bit more difficult, leaving one to either copy the filename separately, or type it manually after pasting the path.
Beyond file management
Outside of file management, there are utilities that for me anyway kind of ended up consuming a big chunk of what I used file managers for. I’m not sure of any examples for Windows, but on Mac you’ve got LaunchBar and Quicksilver, and on Linux, Albert and a few others. The idea behind these tools is to take a couple a few basic ideas together that go places where system level searching tools (like Spotlight and Cortana) stop:
- Non-linear fuzzy searching that optimises itself over time to what you type. For me, launching Scrivener on my system involves hitting the global shortcut for this tool and typing
sthenEnter, because that’s how much I use it. It learned that from my usage, I didn’t have to configure it. All of the folders I access, all of the programs I frequently launch, become only easier to do so as time goes by. - An Object + Action based model, where simply pressing
Enterinvokes what is equivalent to a double-click in a file manager (see above), but additional actions can be done with the selection. Tab, in LaunchBar for example, will typically invoke second-object selection, allowing one to target the second selection with the first. Say I select Scrivener, then hit Tab and typezipthen Enter. Moments later I’ve got a zipped copy of the Scrivener.app executable created and selected as now the primary object, which I can thenTaband select a folder to send it to (or my dual-pane file manager to upload it to the active FTP server, wow).
That then is the basic structure of how these tools work, and where you go with them from there is… well all over the place, and depends a lot on the flexibility of the tool. The question becomes, why use a file manager to drill down into some folder, double-click on a file to load it into a text editor, select all of the text, copy it, close the window, switch to the target application, and paste, then close your file manager window or whatever—when you can just take the selected text file, hit Tab, and buffer its contents directly into the clipboard, or perhaps straight into another tool if it takes text drops?
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What about links to your tools of choice.