Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if you're serious, but

> Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

> usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash;

So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually. But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though?

There's a reason why certain large classes of disabled users are on Windows. Stephen Hawking used Windows.

Aside from the disabled, the mechanics of Windows have always been better, no matter how bad they actually were. That last bit is my opinion, but it is true that many, many more disabled users are on Windows. If they can figure it out, couldn't your roommate? I'm joking of course, some people just seem to have a completely different way of thinking about things and certainly it is a fact that at least some portion of the population prefers the way macOS does things just like there are some people who can only use their chin to move a mouse.

I figured out very early on Windows (this was the days of 3.x) that the Alt key could activate the menu and then let you browse the items with the cursor keys, and the underlined letters (which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently) work in combination with Alt to activate UI elements. I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Mac OS. You had to inspect each menu first with the mouse (and hold down the mouse button while doing so), and hope that there was a keyboard shortcut assigned to the items you needed. It's possible to use Windows almost entirely without a mouse, although I've only had to do that to install mouse drivers or reload a glitched one. The same can't be said for Mac OS.

Some of the Finder keyboard shortcuts seem very counterintuitive; for example, the arrow keys move the selected item (same as in Windows), but although opening the selected item(s) is a very common task and one would expect that to be mapped to a very common key like Space or Enter like all the other file managers I've used, I believe one of those initiates a rename (a relatively uncommon operation) and the other does nothing, and the actual shortcut to open the selected item is Command+DownArrow or Command+O. I guess they make sense in their own way, but apparently I'm not the only one who finds this very unusual and confusing:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/why-does-the-...

https://superuser.com/questions/59007/enter-to-open-a-file-i...

https://superuser.com/questions/176450/open-file-shortcut-fo...

https://superuser.com/questions/134892/how-to-open-folder-wi...

https://superuser.com/questions/119871/how-do-you-open-a-fol...

You can press Command+Shift+? to open a search box for the menu items. Not the same thing, but I find it useful sometimes. I also believe you don't need to hold down the mouse button to inspect the menus.

In the end, I'd rate both (Windows nad macOS) as equally painful/unintuitive to use without a mouse.

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

For max fun though, hold down opt/alt while you have a menu displayed and watch the options change.

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

The majority of Windows applications I've used also follow that (using Ctrl instead), because the unmodified keys will do something else (like inserting the pressed letter, in a word processor/text editor); the difference with Finder/Explorer is that browsing through the filesystem is the primary purpose, and arrows/Enter/Backspace to move selection/select/go back are far more convenient and easy to use than arrows/Cmd+O/Cmd+[.

I wonder if there is almost some sort of vi/emacs divide here.

>(which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently)

I can still see the underlined letters. Are you on Windows 10?

Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click and "print".

the other really great life-saver for me is the proxy icon on windows... just drag it out to another app to open itinerary another editor/viewer, or right click it to get the path and click one of the folders in the pop up to open it in finder.... always miss that in windows and linux... always hunting for where the file i’m currently viewing is

want to remove a device? drag it to the trash where the icon suddenly changes to eject

"intuitive"

Or right click > eject, which I’m pretty sure is the same as Windows.

> > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print;

> this is just the most obtuse way of doing things.

Perhaps that was a bad example of the incredible leg-up Mac OS X had over Windows around printing... all-around, printing was so much more straightforward on the Mac.

To extend the example: (a) printing to PDF has always worked - no need to install a 3rd party "PDF printer"; (b) PDFs and print spool jobs are indistinguishable, hence "drag a PDF to a print spool" works fine. (c) Accidentally printed to the wrong printer? Easy to fix - just open the intended printer and drag the job from the wrong one over.

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