OSNews

Well, for a start, there's the lack of cut and paste support, and the annoying limitations of the copy function (not telling you about date/time differences, making you overwrite entire folders that have the same name instead of just letting you overwrite the changed bits):

http://www.xvsxp.com/files/copying.php

I've also had wierd, inexplicable experiences using the Finder, like thinking I had copied a large group of MP3s off a USB drive, only to find out that OS X had only copied *shortcuts* to those files. Eventually I figured out I had to hold down the Option key while dragging, or something like that, but it seemed to me to be quite the unusual/unwanted default behavior.

I also really miss having a two-pane folder-tree/folder-contents view, and miss having the folders listed before files instead of all mixed together (although maybe I could get used to that).

edit: Of course to get a really broad overview of what's wrong with the finder, you might as well visit the page that the article links to:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/18

Edited 2007-01-28 16:31

and miss having the folders listed before files instead of all mixed together (although maybe I could get used to that).

Never could get used that, personally. I use BeOS, and Tracker is very obviously-inspired by the OS8/9 Finder - but the "sort folders before files" option was, IMO, the first really good thing to come out of the OpenTracker project.

Cancel a move in Windows and the already-moved files are in the destination folder and no longer in the source folder! The Finder does not have this problem...

It won't be easy to answer you with concrete example and avoid being accused of trolling. I honestly think that most people has a reason to dislike the Finder, but i really doubt that everybody agrees on issues.

First of all, the finder is the key app of the mac. It the way you access to your apps and documents. The only way, until you put it in the dock or use spotlight/quicksilver tools. Yep, you access Terminal.app by the finder and no ctrl-alt-F1 for your sake. It's the source of everything.

So as you can imagine, every issues that lead to crash/hang/infinite reload of the Finder is "you-cannot-imagine-how" painfull. And there is issues. Not a lot, surely, but it's always too much.

I reported one here, once : (at the end of the post, about spotlight and finder integration) http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15145&comment_id=141857

Things you can see is (or was) :
- infinite loop on empty .swf file (fixed after a quicktime update, long mounths after the bug was reported to apple)
- Canceling the move/deletion of a lot of files totally unreponsive (due to the lock flag modification on each file, but that should be reported to user)
- Finder tries to preview a 500MB tiff file, sometimes slowing down the computer so much that you hardly can selecting something else to stop it.
- The standard way to go in upper hierarchy of directories is to cmd-click on window icon. (this will be discussed if i leave it as is : generally you cannot go anywhere without being able to go to parent directory in more than one click - generally)
- the .DS_Store files it leaves every where, even if you don't touch the window ( http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=DS_STORE )
- Mounts and umount removable (network and USB, firewire is quite nice) filesystems soooooo slowly (i didn't try on command line, this may be an OS issue, but recent sshfs of fuse make me doubt, it was quite fast)
- The incompatible of old and new way of attaching documents to applications. Signatures and so where perfect before the internet (one document edited by the same app, ever) but not theses days.
- ...

I'll stop here before making to much people upset. If a mac fan is over there, these are the things i noticed, if you've got workarounds, i would pretty happy to know them, and pardon me for my ignorance