Shock horror – appalling “feature” in Mac finder

Posted by: Marc Palmer on Dec 5, 2005 | 2 Comments

Drag and drop is great. Drag a folder called X over onto another folder called X to add new files to the original X folder.

WRONG! Not in Mac OS X finder. It will remove the old folder completely first and then copy the new one there. Therefore if you have a folder containing some new files and an original with some old (not in the new folder) you lose the old files not present in the new folder.

This is truly appalling, especially as it simply warns that you will replace the folder – it doesn’t say "and this means you will lose the files not in the new folder". For people coming from Windows this is insanity.

Here’s some other people talking about it.
Bad, bad bad, Fix it Apple.

2 Comments

Marc Palmer
December 5, 2005
The only workaround for this I can see so far – in the absence of “modifier keys” for the drag operation in Finder, is to open a Terminal window and do “cp -R newfolder oldfolder” but that is beyond most GUI minded users.
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James Closs
January 10, 2006
Actually this isn’t a ‘bug’ but the way the Mac Finder has always worked. For people like me who’ve been using Macs since the days of System 6 (or before) it’s just how we expect things to behave.

I think the new version of Path Finder (if it ever gets released) is going to have the ability to modify this ‘feature’.
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