Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

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Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all the things you can from explorer when opening and saving including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> file-old.txt and then saving the current file as file.txt), moving files (create a folder "old", drag file.txt info old, save the new file as file.txt where the old file.txt was.

Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app

And of course you can set the icon size in Windows file dialogs, something you can't do in MacOS file open/save dialog

So in this case, thank god the engineering mindset won out in Windows, at least for this particular feature. Whatever UX designer on MacOS decided to neuter the file dialogs failed UX class apparently and chose based on some random airfairy idea then users actually getting work done.

- Re: file open dialog - repurposing Windows Explorer means that every time I want to open a file in an app in windows, I have to look for it, rather than just drag/drop from a window I likely already have open into the file open dialog (or from a quick-find launcher tool).

- "Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app" - I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here.

- Don't get me started on sizes for accessibility reasons, that was partly why I had to switch elder friends to a mac after watching them suffer on windows. Things may have improved over the past few years though.

- I really want to see Microsoft or the FOSS community figure these things out, I dip my toe in once in a while but I think there's an evolution in cultural/governance/funding needed. Maybe the popularity of videoconferencing may help the FOSS world actually see how people work rather than just posting pictures of 'screenshots' and battlestations.

Have you tried? A properly written Win32 app is supposed to handle drag-and-drop of files onto its window, and treat it as "Open". Try this in Notepad, for example.

That said, I'm not sure what this has to do with repurposing Windows Explorer? It uses the same widget to browse files, but the File Open window is not actually an Explorer window.

GP is talking about drag-and-drop of a folder into the file picker view, which results in the file picker navigating to that folder. Or drag-and-drop a file into the file picker view, which results in the file picker navigating to the enclosing folder and then selecting the file being dragged.

This is even more useful when saving files than opening files.

I see. I have to say, though, as described, this sounds as a rather inconsistent behavior to me. Does the macOS file picker not provide file management functionality at all (e.g. creating folders or moving them around)? If it does, it's kinda strange that it would behave differently from the standard file manager.

> Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app

While I don't disagree that it would be nice to be able to do more of the same things in file picker as in finder, there is the possibility to right-click -> open in Finder

Filepicker also supposrt Finders "go to" (cmd+shift+g) that let's you type paths, with autocomplete and support for ~, which is a super nice feature.

An amazing feature of the windows file picker that i hardly ever see mentioned is that you can simply paste in a url into the name field and it will automatically download it to tmp and refer to the file.

i run into this a lot and always think in my head how much easier this is in windows

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