I think frustrating is the most appropriate word. Finder is great if my files are organized and I know exactly where something is. My concrete one... The save dialog opens where it was last, so files land in places I didn’t choose, and nothing in Finder or Spotlight helps me later unless I remember the name or the contents.
In the open and save file dialogs, the location is a dropdown containing, amongst other things, recent locations, which would list where the file ended up. I think the number of recents is configurable in System Settings.
It should also show up in the Recents sidebar entry, though I don’t use it so I’m not sure.
The save dialog sidebar is configurable, I’ve put my “inbox” there.
I agree it would be better for this to be an option, but I think the status quo is more clicks, not nothing exists.
Time is merely the default order. You can also sort by what the document says. The amount. The date printed on it. Who it's from. So a receipt search isn't "when did I save this" it is "the $1200 one from March." That's what makes it work beyond photos, where all you have is time and place.
Fair, and I should have posted it as a Show HN. It's my app and my essay, and I said so in the thread as soon as it came up. New account because I've read here for years without commenting. Happy for a mod to relabel it.
I find Explorer slow and frustrating, while Finder works but is basic and cumbersome and useless for anything more than basic opening or moving.
I remember outstanding file managers way back in the MS-DOS days. Sidekick, QuickDOS, and Norton Commander were great.
My take is that expert users use the terminal while regular users don’t like to do much with files. So there’s no push for a powerful graphical file manager.
And yet copying multiple large files from or to the same disk grinds the throughput to a halt on Windows where Finder keeps up close to theoretical bandwidth in sum.
Windows file I/O has always felt slower than Linux, Mac, anything. Still does. I don’t know what’s wrong with it or why it’s unfixable.
SSDs make it tolerable… not by fixing it but by being fast enough to hide it. Back in the spinning disc days you could tell a windows machine by how much kerchunking the drive was doing.
It's my app, no veil intended. It pulls all the drives, folders into one stream . So it doesn't matter where a file is located. Then it reads what is inside so you can type in what you remember.
If you have the time to be focused on folder hierarchy and organization, great. Most of the people I help don't, and I built this for them. In building it, I learned that organizing files wastes much more time than you think. Finding files is all anyone actually needs.
I don't disagree, but it depends. Some files just don't stand alone and are related to each other.
"Stream" photo libraries of people who take pictures for work know this issue all too well: there's a lot of junk mixed with their personal photos. What if we had... folders: one personal and one for work or per customer.
So true, so true. Every time I think I've got my structure set up properly, I then do something in haste, and can't find it later. Power user and file manager are two totally different things.
Not all data fits neatly into a hierarchy of boxes.
But, if the person doesn’t know where the file is, Finder has a “Recent” virtual folder right a the top that’ll list all files the person worked on most recent on the top. I often use it to get to screenshots. There’s also a lot of basic operations that are there since the 1990s any power user would know.
