A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
The former “Olivetti Study and Research Centre” was also the base of the “Interaction Design Institute Ivrea” (2001–06) where Wiring, Arduino and Processing were born…!
One can also book seats in night trains -- which I've never understood, btw. That only seems logical as a last resort when you need to be somewhere but got no money to get there, when you're planning to sleep the day away at your destination, or enjoy the prisoner's dilemma where you hope the potential co-passenger decides not to "defect" (buy a ticket) such that the seat next to you is free and you can lay down and sleep at night. But anyway, more on topic, I am wondering if the laying down is what you mean or something else in addition
The seats on long distance Amtrak trains are not at all like you're imagining.
Think of them as more like a lounger/recliner. Not the most comfortable you'll ever sit in, but it's reasonably easy to sleep them in, and even more so if you're young. Someone next to you matters only if they snore or smell.
Genuine q: is cmd–backspace too much? I’m in general pretty satisfied with the Finder keyboard navigation/editing. Especially with “enter” for rename, copy/paste/cut/move and deletion too…
I never understood the enter for rename shortcut. People open (or "execute", which is the general understanding of the action for the "enter" key) files far more than they rename them.
It makes sense if one considers the angle of how single-key shortcuts are much more disaster-prone.
For example, if the user has a large number of files selected and accidentally triggers the open shortcut by hitting enter, their computer is going to be stuck spinning its wheels for a while (the more files involved and the heavier the applications they open in, the worse it'll be) unless they force restart. Involving a modifier key filters for intention pretty well, and so while this scenario is possible with ⌘O, it's far less likely.
Most Mac shortcuts seem to follow this, with those that are single-key by default doing relatively harmless and easily reversible things.
> It makes sense if one considers the angle of how single-key shortcuts are much more disaster-prone.
> ...
> Most Mac shortcuts seem to follow this, with those that are single-key by default doing relatively harmless and easily reversible things.
The enter-to-rename behavior has been in Mac OS since near the beginning, when versions were just named something like "System N.M").
IIRC, I've heard they had very detailed UI design documents back then, that explained their choices (e.g. I've heard they explained the reason for the menu bar being at the top of the screen rather than the top of a window was the cursor will just stop there, requiring less mousing precision).
So if that's the case, there should be documents confirming or denying your speculation.
The Mac didn’t have a CLI in the first 16 years or so, so there’s no traditional “execute” meaning for the Enter key. I’d argue that the thought here was that by pressing that key, you’d want to enter a new name for the selected file.
That's not a bad thought, but traditiona Mac keyboards didn't even have an "enter" key. (And nor do their current tenkeyless ones.) They just had a "return" key. The "enter" key only came around when the 10-key numpad was introduced, and it gave a different key code than the return key (which lives/lived where "enter" lives on PC keyboards).
I don't recall whether "enter" renamed files, and I can't check whether it does at the moment because all my mac keyboards within reach are tenkeyless, but "return" always has.
If it worked like that in other Mac apps, I wouldn’t mind. Then you would just adjust to “this is how MacOS does cut-and-paste” and after an initial adjustment it would make complete sense.
But in every other Mac app, even in TextEdit, you would Cmd-X to cut a piece of text and Cmd-V to then paste it somewhere else. The same logic is used to e.g. move an image within a note or email, which is also a file.
So Finder is simply inconsistent with the rest of the OS, and after 4 years as a Mac user I have just given up and use either drag-and-drop or a terminal when I need to move stuff.
The finder probably chooses this paradigm because cut + paste is destructive. If you cut text and never paste it, the next time you copy out cut you lose that text forever. So if you used the same paradigm for files in the finder, you could accidentally and permanently delete a file because you cut it and then fat fingered copy instead of paste. If this happens with text from a file you can often just close the file and not save to get your text back, or hit undo because cut text is part of your undo history (usually). But storing whole files in some undo history seems like it could go wrong real quick since either you couldn’t actually delete the file from disk until the history expired or the finder was restarted, or an undo might take a significant amount of time because you moved between file systems. Or imagine if the destination file system crashed during transfer or unmounted after. Then you couldn’t undo at all.
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
https://thenabokovian.org/node/53398
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