To make this super-fast, the process would have to be changed like this: All 25 pending files are sent to a second (background) thread that processes them, without pause, in sequence. Then AU picks the next from the list and so on. It picks the first, starts the animation to add it to the progress window, and once the animation (which takes probably a 4th of a second) is finished, the unarchiving process is started.
WILL TOTALFINDER REMOVE DUPLICATE FILES ARCHIVE
Such as: Archive Utility (AU) gets a list of 25 files to process. I suspect it's a case of "lazy programming" by putting the animation in sequence with the processing. Sadly, after XP, Microsoft essentially ruined this feature by inexplicably hiding the + symbols unless you happen to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer.
WILL TOTALFINDER REMOVE DUPLICATE FILES WINDOWS
Windows Explorer only shows the (universally understood) + sign next to folders that have stuff in them, saving you time when you're looking for something. Then there's the fact that Finder always shows you the dumb disclosure triangle (WTF is a triangle supposed to tell you) next to a folder, even when the folder is empty. There's only "Keep both," "Stop," or "Replace." WTF?Īnd if you're copying a bunch of files into a folder and there's a duplicate in there already, there's no option to skip the duplicate and continue copying.
Then there's the fact that Finder's "New folder" command doesn't create the folder WITHIN the selected one it doesn't even give you the option to do so if you right-click on a folder. That's because the File dialog erroneously put the file at some higher directory level from the one you clicked on. Which brings us to more defects: Ever click on a file in a subdirectory in a Save dialog to overwrite it, only to look at the file later and discover that it's the OLD version? Then you think about it, and hey, I wasn't asked if I wanted to overwrite the file. It's still the underpinning of file dialogs. The problem with "replacing" Finder is that you can't, really. And it doesn't work everywhere yet they forgot about the desktop. Only in the latest release, after YEARS of user complaints, can you finally have Finder sort correctly (with FOLDERS ON TOP of alphabetical lists). Here's one way to do just that.Īnymore? The Finder has been a disgrace since the advent of OS X, and probably decades longer. Until they do, however, you can harness the power of Unix-even while in Finder-to speed up the task. Given how often we all deal with compressed files, it'd be nice to see Apple clean up this mess. This is a great example of how an everyday task can make you think you have a slow computer, when what you really have is a fast computer with a slow interface element. If visual feedback is really required, a window with a single progress bar for the entire task would be OK, but would still slow operations down. They just slow down the task.įinder (née Archive Utility) should just execute the task without any visual feedback (though it should pop up a window if there are exceptions). And there's no need for it-the separate individual progress bars, appearing and vanishing in under a second each, provide no useful feedback to the user. So it's not the computer that's slow, it's the GUI interface to the computer that (in this particular use case) is incredibly, horrendously slow. (You can watch this video for a visual comparison of expanding the same set of files in Finder and Terminal.) To put those results another way, if expansion time is linear, gzip could expand 23,631 files in the time Finder takes to expand 24 files. By comparison, I made a screen recording (with an onscreen stopwatch for timing) of Finder expanding the same 24 files it took 12.8 seconds for all the dialog dancing to end. gz archive files (on a solid state drive), and the real line in the output shows exactly how long it took to expand them all: 0.013 seconds. Unix actually gives us a way to see exactly how fast it is, via the time command: $ time gzip -d -k *.gz If you try this, you'll find out it's nearly instantaneous-press Return, and the files are expanded. gz files in a folder (and keep the originals), you'd use this command in Terminal: gzip -d -k *.gz
gz archives is gzip so to expand all the. Just how fast is the task, if the GUI doesn't get in the way? Thanks to the Unix core of macOS, we can answer that question using Terminal, the geeky front-end to the Unix core. The end result is that users think they have a slow machine-"it took over 12 seconds to expand 25 tiny little archives!"-when what they really have is a horrendously slow GUI interface to a super fast task. Not only is this randomly-resizing dialog box visually annoying, it turns what should be a super-fast process into one that takes a ridiculous amount of time. Sorry, but your browser does not support the tag here's a link to the movie.