In article , Snit
wrote:

I find it amazing how many (though certainly not all) Linux "advocates"
find it hard to understand the possibility of there existing features on
other solutions that they do not have on Linux. On the Mac it is the
norm that you can rename and move files around a drive and the file will
still show up in "Recent Items" menus and the like (as shown in the
videos). This is a part of the nature of how files work with the file
system and any program can have this functionality basically for "free"
-- a developer just has to use the standard file hooks (or whatever...
again, I am not a programmer). There are SOME programs which do not do
this -- most notably Adobe programs (such as Photoshop, but also others)
and many text editors (BBEdit and the like, perhaps tied to programmers
referencing paths in programs... not sure). But the norm on the Mac is
for this to "just work".

in classic mac os, files and folders were referenced by a file and
folder id. the name or path to it didn't matter and could change, even
while files were open, normally without problems. however, as with
everything, there are some exceptions.

mac os x, being based on unix, is highly reliant on path names, which
changed a lot of how things worked internally. a lot of that has been
resolved to where things mostly work the way they did before as far as
the user is concerned, but not everything.

photoshop is built on a cross-platform framework adobe wrote and is
likely the reason for anything deviating from the norm.

bbedit has no issues whatsoever with moving and renaming open files.

When I discussed this with Linux folks in COLA they could not believe
it. It was "magic" to them. When I showed them videos they insisted they
must be forged... no OS could possibly do what macOS was doing!

a lot of people are unfamiliar with anything other than what they use
on a regular basis and can't imagine things being any different.

Then they got mad at me... which I find odd. There are things macOS does
not do as well as the competition... many things, really. It is not a
good gaming system, for example,

it can be, but gamers don't buy macs so game developers don't usually
bother writing for mac, although there are exceptions.

ios, on the other hand, is the world's largest gaming platform.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...apple-iphone-r
eigns-top-device-playing-video-games/3174546002/
By the numbers, Apple's iPhone tops PlayStation, Xbox as most popular
video game device

and the Linux command line tends to be
a LOT more robust (at least "out of the box").

both have the usual shells (bash, tcsh, zsh, etc.) so the functionality
and robustness should be the same.

For years GNOME and its
derivatives had window "snapping" where it was easy to line up windows
and macOS did not (Apple *finally* added that). Hell, there was a time
you could not resize macOS windows from anywhere but the bottom right...

the grow box was originally the bottom right corner, a relative large
and easy to hit target, where the two scroll bars would have overlapped
had it not been there.

resizing windows from the edges means a very narrow resize region at
the edge (usually just a few pixels), without any visual indication
exactly where it begins and ends, making it a much harder to hit
target, potentially causing an errant click in a different window.
we've all done that at least once, probably many times.

this is modeled by fitts' law, which states that the time to hit a
target is a function of distance and size of the target.

there's even a formula for it:
https://miro.medium.com/max/1100/0*uTaba8tLirkoiZ8X

and even now they have menus only at the top, which made more sense when
we had smaller screens, and still offers SOME benefits, but also has
downsides.

another application of fitts' law.

a menubar at the top of the display means it's impossible to overshoot.
it's infinitely tall, making it a *huge* target size, a *significant*
benefit in overall ui speed.

with a menubar in each window, the target size is much smaller and
*very* easy to overshoot, greatly reducing overall speed and increasing
error rates.

larger screens does mean a longer distance to travel, but that is
outweighed by the infinitely tall target size. you can also flick the
mouse fast, and due to the non-linear acceleration curve, the cursor
will fly to the top (or whatever edge), even on the largest displays,
without needing to move one's hand very far, making this mostly a
non-issue.

I like macOS but I do not get having one's ego tied to any
OS... they each have pros and cons. No harm in speaking of them and
understanding them. Or even in disagreeing in what is good or bad.

yep. everything has pros and cons.

unfortunately, there are a lot of people who *don't* understand the
platforms they don't use and fall for the various myths, or they only
see the cons, never the pros.