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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users. The reason people put crap all over their desktops is because they "lose" it if they put it anywhere else, while the desktop always stays "where it is". I don't think anyone's come up with a good solution to that problem, yet (Apple's isn't very good, and Windows' similar moves with its defaults aren't any better) and we're far enough into computers being common that it doesn't look like a majority of users are ever going to get comfortable with the same abstractions and interfaces we're all comfortable with.

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Believe it or not, the way the filesystem worked on the original Mac operating system was that things did stay where you put them. Open a disk and the folders on it could be put anywhere in that 2D space, and each folder's contents could similarly be anywhere in their virtual 2D space, and each disk/folder opened in its own window that even re-opened in exactly the same position with exactly the same size as when you last closed it.

Gnome did this in 3.0 and called it spatial browsing. It was awful with a hierarchy 5 folders deep you ended up opening 5 windows.

I don't think the cultural convention of directories in Linux is well suited to spatial filesystem navigation. Still, it'd be nice to still have the option, especially with AppImage doing a reasonably job of approximating the one-file-application paradigm of Macs.

The normal procedure of clicking on a folder result in redirecting the existing file management window to the new directory is the only functional way to operate. The behavior of creating a new window per directory inevitably creates too many window management tasks in terms of constantly closing extra windows.

Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.

The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.

Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.

That's a good point—that's probably the closest a file manager has come to being truly usable by most folks.

Relatedly, IMO iOS took a huge step backwards in UX when iOS7 moved away from a highly spatial interaction metaphor for practically the entire OS—by which I don't mean the skeuomorphism, exactly, but things like folders sliding the screen "open" when tapped, so that they had a sense of physical location within the main screen. Or "slide to unlock" looking like a physical slider so you didn't even need to read it to know what to do. The loss of the security blanket that was the physical (or at least faux-physical) home button has hurt it, too.

It was great until you had a disk shared between the large monitors at school and the tiny one you had at home. So long as all screens are the same sized and layed out the same it worked good. However any form of using two different computers and the whole thing started to fall apart. Throw in multiple monitors and it isn't possible to do this usefully.

It also only worked well when you only had a few files in any folder. If you have 100 files that are related in one folder and you can't find anything without sorting it alphabetically. Depending on how your brain organizes things this might not matter.

I think the concept may just need some slight modification to work in more modern cases like this. Namely, by making the interface zoomable.

I think if you leave Finder with the defaults (icon view) it still does this. I think if you change the view, say, to list view, Finder may apply that view to all folders you haven't specifically chosen a view type for. I think if you specifically choose a type (like icons for your a folder of images) it stays that way, but it's not clear to me exactly what happens.

This seems on point. The conversation at the dawn of personal computing would have been:

> Where's file X for project A?

> On the floppy disk for project A.

And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:

> Where's file X for project A?

> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".

Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.

For whatever reason, I have a really hard time with the Mac filesystem and have resorted to either command line or files in docs or downloads.

> The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users

It's basically hidden entirely in iOS, probably for this reason.

A better search functionality would help.

What do you mean? It’s very good. Just have to change the finder pref to only search current and subfolders

And we’re on Hacker News and it’s a Unix system, why are we even talking about Finder.app for searching...? Use mdfind.

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