WOW - the best feature here is that Total Finder enables cut-and-paste to move files!
This is the one thing I have missed terribly from Windows. It boggles my mind that Apple thinks all that clicking, rearranging windows, dragging, shifting, and dropping is a sane way to move files. Intuitive yes, but more painful than typing it out at a command line. Sometimes Apple gets stuck in "make it pretty" and forgets "make it useful".
A shortcut in Windows for this is to use the right mouse button when dragging. That shows you the context menu when you drop the file, allowing you to choose between copy and move. An interesting thing is when you drag files on the same drive, it defaults to move. When the source and destination locations are on different drives, it defaults to copy.
2. If you forget and you paste with Cmd-V thinking that you did Cmd-X to cut, you end up copying the files, so you have to go back, re-select them, and delete them manually.
I just can't possibly understand _why_ they would explicitly think: "no, let's not use the standard user interaction here".
Because in some subtle ways, it's very different from the standard user interaction — if one cuts a piece of text from a TextEdit document, that text disappears immediately. That seems undesirably unsafe in a file system explorer, though, which is why Windows doesn't delete a file that's been cut in Explorer unless and until it actually gets pasted somewhere else. This puts a burden on the user to remember that a seemingly-identical interaction works differently in Explorer than it does elsewhere in the system.
Apple's way puts a burden on the user of remembering a different menu item/key combo, but doesn't break the similarity of the cut/copy/paste interactions with those in the rest of the system. They've just chosen a different set of tradeoffs than Windows did for this engineering problem.
Windows dims the files when you cut them, giving you a visual indication. This is pretty similar to how cut and paste works in Excel too.
I'm actually not sure why anyone would defend the Apple way of doing this -- it's truly baffling. Windows has some terrible conventions and Apple has some terrible conversions -- we'd all be better off choosing the best of both then blindly defending one over the other.
Actually, in Windows, that "differently in Explorer than it does elsewhere in the system." is not 100% correct: there is no 'everywhere else'.
MS Office does not have a proper clipboard, either. For example, in Excel, open-select-cut-close-paste does not do what one expects:
- cut does not delete data from the clipboard, but
sort-of marks it for a future move.
- close makes the app forget about that move,
clearing the clipboard.
- because the clipboard is empty, paste does nothing.
IIRC, the clipboard is even broken within a single document, but I do not remember details (something like cut-enter data in a cell-select destination-paste?)
Just saw it mentioned somewhere in all the coverage before Lion's release. Maybe Siracusa's giant review but probably saw it before that from some NDA-breaker on Twitter. :)
This is the one thing I have missed terribly from Windows. It boggles my mind that Apple thinks all that clicking, rearranging windows, dragging, shifting, and dropping is a sane way to move files. Intuitive yes, but more painful than typing it out at a command line. Sometimes Apple gets stuck in "make it pretty" and forgets "make it useful".