I’ll say that as much as I love Apple and macOS, Finder has some pretty terrible defaults that make file management pretty difficult for the average user. The default “All Files” view is atrocious.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
626 points (98.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
25730 readers
1231 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
- Not being able to create a file
- Folders aren’t by default listed at the top
- Spring-loaded folders are hit or miss
- No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
- No good intuitive way to reset any folder defaults
- .DS_Store and ._DS_Store (nuff said)
Folders aren’t by default listed at the top
This is a aweful windows only thing. Anyone who likes it should be ashamed.
No good intuitive way to set defaults for ALL folders at once
This is inexperience with the finder because it's ridiculously easy to set this.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I HATE that windows will sort folders at the top instead of alphabetically with everything else. I guess it comes from using a Mac for so long.
I agree about .DS_Store in any mixed os environment though.
Yeah, I don’t know why having folders at the top would make anything easier.
load more comments
(5 replies)
What is a spring-loaded folder?
I use that all the time but never knew it had a specific name.
This doesn't sound any easier than using Ctrl+X to cut files and Ctrl+V to paste them wherever you want to?
Depends on how you use your computer. Plenty of people would tell you that using a GUI file manager and cutting/moving files is inefficient on any platform as opposed to just using a terminal.
There are times where it’s nice to drag a file or group of files and have Finder show me the content of the destination folder before I decide to drop the files. But sure I could do that with 3 mouse clicks and 4 keyboard taps.
I think that terminal only or primarily terminal is valuable, a combination of mouse and keyboard with shortcuts is valuable, and also the ability to just use your mouse (especially helpful for accessibility) is also valuable, and they all should be supported.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
I think most computer users now don't know that file systems exist
Especially younger people. They're used to files just... being there on their phone. Photo albums? Nah, just scroll though every photo you've ever taken to find the right one.
That, and having powerful search functionality + tagging has made perfect folder structures less of a requirement. I've never had trouble finding documents in paperless-ngx just by searching, for example.
"SDD"?
"SDD"?
Yes. Solid Disk Disk.
Solid disk drive
Thank you.
Just missing a random pile of files on the desktop.
What is this "desktop" of which you speak?
Is that what's under all these files?
Desktops, are like ogres. They have layers 😬
My actual desk and office - messy. My desktop - folder, folder, 4 shortcuts. My phone -groups of apps ordered by function - Pebble, Office, Entertainment, etc. My garage - absolute hoarder nightmare from hell cause I just can't seem to get to it. Why I can be ordered in one area and not in another is beyond me.
Do you even git?
Surely experiment 1…n should be branches.
Realistically, the skip should be named "Desktop"
I find myself having too many nested folders, and I’m just a normie. I wonder how deep they go for you tech people.
At some points, Windows won’t let me change the file name because it was too long and I’m assuming the file path to it plus the ridiculously long name (“person last name, first name - type of document (purpose) yyyymmdd”) just breaks Windows.
Sometimes I have to copy those files to my desktop just to rename the new file, so that I can upload the file to an online system that only lets me upload files with names under 42 characters long. It’s wild.
Too deep.
I am having a peoblem bwcause sometimes I broke my own rules or sorted every itme in it's own folder.
This was one of the reasons I quit trying to develop on Windows way back when. I had a very well organized system of subfolders for all my code, and it was literally running into some kind of path length limit trying to import deeply nested dependencies in certain projects. This was WELL into the era of 64-bit computing, absolutely no excuse other than Microsoft taking shortcuts.
I still run into this issue when one of my company's clients requires developing on Windows. Doesn't take many subfolders before node_modules just starts breaking.
There are lots of reasons I hate developing on windows and that's certainly one of them.
You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26'000 characters.
- Open the Registry Editor.
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
- Find the LongPathsEnabled DWORD value, double-click it, and set its value to 1
- Restart your computer
- Be free and happy
That sounds like something my organization would have restricted access to.
And I guess this isn’t the default for backwards compatibility with 1978’s tech?
A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don't understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can't add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can't totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
For every other company I would buy that argument. But for one that forces customers to throw away millions of computers which can’t run Win 11… no.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Well son of a bitch, there was a workaround
load more comments
(4 replies)
~/Desktop/sort/sort/sortme/shit_from_dt/sort/really_important_shit/sort