Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

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It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home.

The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds as “correct”, which interferes with this process. For example, over the years I’ve encountered numerous posters complaining about how macOS can’t do X thing, after which I point out that X thing is right there as an easy to find top level menu item, but the poster in question never bothered to take a look around and just assumed the functionality didn’t exist since it wasn’t surfaced the same way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming from.

Of course there are things macOS just doesn’t do, but there’s plenty that it does if users are willing to set their preconceptions aside for a moment.

If you approach macOS the Linux or BSD way, it feels like Windows Powershell. Of course you can use brew and stuff, setup you dev enviroments etc. But when it comes to system settings, its bad, very bad. Also stuff like docker, k8s suffer performance and usability.

Docker, etc are going to suffer on anything that’s not Linux due to how coupled they are to Linux. Even WSL isn’t as good as bare metal Linux in that regard. To me it speaks to a need for return to platform agnosticism in dev tooling more than anything.

WSL2 works fine, but that's merely because it's a linux VM with a little polish.

I'd kill to do dev on a linux machine, but alas it's not company policy :(

One thing that I always hated about macOS is the menu bar placement.

Ironically, in the long run, it has proven to be an asset for the simple reason that any macOS app has to have a main menu with commands in it, if it doesn't want to look silly. So this whole modern trend of replacing everything with "hamburger" menus that don't have the functionality isn't killing UX quite so bad there.

Although some apps - Electron ones, especially - stick a few token options there, and then the rest still has to be pixel-hunted in the window. Some don't even put "Settings" where it's supposed to be (under the application menu). Ugh.

On the last paragraph, something is better than nothing, though. It’s always bugged me that Electron doesn’t offer Windows and Linux users a way to enable the menus that’ve been provided for the Mac version.

As somebody who recently had to switch to Mac for work, my experience has been the exact opposite of this. Every other OS I've used since Windows 95 I've been able to get to grips with the same way: start off using the mouse to find my way around the UI, and introduce keyboard shortcuts as and when I find them useful. Eventually I get to the point of being able to use either exclusively keyboard or exclusively mouse for most tasks.

MacOS seems to _require_ some unergonomic combination of both from the get go. Some basic things are easy with the keyboard but hard/impossible with the mouse and vice versa. The Finder app doesn't even have a button to go 'up' a directory for god's sake.

It helps to keep in mind where the OS and its core user base is coming from.

For the case of the up button for example, prior to OS X the Finder was a spacial file manager where each folder had a single corresponding window that remembered its position on screen, allowing users to rely on spacial memory to quickly navigate filesystems. Its windows didn’t even have toolbars, because they weren’t navigator windows — every time you opened a folder you got a new window (unless that folder’s window was already open, in which case it was foregrounded).

So when OS X rolls around in ~2000 and switches the Finder to navigator windows, they’re looking at what existing users will find familiar. Back/forward is easy since most had used a web browser by that point and map cleanly to most people’s mental models (“I want to go back”), but up? That’s a lot more rare. A handful of folks who’d used an FTP client might’ve been familiar with the concept, but few outside of that few would’ve, and how “up” relates to a filesystem is not in any way obvious. And so, the Finder never got an up button, just a key shortcut because anybody advanced enough to be hunting down shortcuts is going to understand the notion of “up” in a filesystem.

Right click the window title and you get a drop down navigation menu of every folder in the hierarchy up to the "/Volumes/$VOLUME" the folder is on.

I'd kill for this on Windows or any mainstream Linux DE.

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