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Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-.

I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.

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Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.

Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged inside them however you want to leave them without necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or anything like that.

There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files.

But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".

I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)

Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your file browser was also your document manager was also your application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows never really supported it (depending on one's view of Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I once briefly heavily used it.)

Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.

The classic Finder offered a list view, in addition to the spatial view, and there was a "clean up" command to tidy up the icons if they got too chaotic.

I really liked it; I miss just... knowing where everything on my system lived, by feel. It was like the concept of a "memory palace", built into the system.

Spatial navigation seems trivial to implement: just store the positions of everything.

...until you consider attaching a large display to your laptop. And then detaching it after you have placed some stuff there.

That reminds me of a tiny fraction of an off hand discussion with some Microsoft engineers closer to the height of their big Mixed Reality investment hype stage and how questions of that become much more interesting when you've got 2D displays and 3D mixed reality displays sharing the same space. Disconnect a monitor but all the windows remain hovering in the 3D displays exactly where they had been. Connect another monitor in roughly the same plane and watch it pick up all those windows. The system has to know all of those positions anyway so in some ways, that sort of spatial navigation where even the displays are spatially navigated is "easier" than in 2D only. Not that storing all those 3D positions or much of anything else about Mixed Reality simulation is easy, by any stretch.

Some of the impression I was given too was how much more important things like spatial navigation were for Mixed Reality usability according to research and usability studies. In three dimensions our brains much more crave that things we put into a place stay put in that place exactly where we put them.

(But yes, doing it in 2D even on a single monitor was harder than it sounds. Another real world example of complications is things like removable read only drives: where do you store its customization and position info and is that something that you can accidentally burn to the disc and then never override?)

I think along the same lines, well, not the living in a terminal bit, but have worked with people who would probably be described as neurodiverse that absolutely hated files moving from the order they'd left them in.

Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.

>I'd guess 99% of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a file though.

I definitely do, as I find makes it quicker to find stuff as project grows in size.

The behaviour of Finder in MacOS (7.1 was my first version) of remembering the position of folders & files I never found that helpful, and in particular it made working on other peoples' machines really hard since you constantly wanted to clean-up or reorder to what made sense to you but didn't want to mess with their preferences (or their particular personal chaos, as it sometimes was).

I just happen to know that John Siracusa has been talking about it for two decades

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

And an HN thread about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12484241

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