my pet Finder bug [updated]

[update]
Fixed in Leopard!

from a TMUG member already using Leopard (10.5):


It’s fixed. Sort as you like, copy & paste, you get the files listed in the order you see them.

What’s more, if you copy from the finder and paste into a rich text document, you get icons. I can’t see any utility in that, but hey, they are putting multiple content types on the clipboard.

sigh. i’ll miss the little bugger – i’ve been feeding and caring for it since the developer previews. oh well. it had a good run – 8 years or so.

[note: this is a quick repost so i could tag the entry for the MacBreak Weekly “Whine List”]

my pet finder bug, which has existed since 10.0 and has been reported with each major release to bugreport.apple.com is as follows. it has been marked as “duplicate” and thus closed, so i know it’s been seen and i’m not the only one who’s complained. but, as yet, it has not been resolved.

this is a long-standing “os X finder doesn’t work like classic finder” issue, and while it’s not a great hardship, it would be nice to see it fixed.

Summary:
files dragged from the finder into another application, or copied from place to place, or even file listings copied and pasted from the finder never retain the order in which they were diplayed in the finder.

Steps to Reproduce:
1 – select several files or folders in a finder window, in list mode, ordered by name. select edit->copy to copy the filenames to the clipboard.

2 – open a textedit document. paste the filenames into the document. the names will be in a different order from their positions in the finder, in a seemingly random new order.

Expected Results:
one would expect that the listing in the clipboard, and thus in the document, would reflect either a: the order in which they were selected (not the case) or b: the order in which they appear in the finder (also, not the case)

Actual Results:
for example, i’ve created several folders via duplication in the finder, named “copy 1” … “copy 9”

in the finder, they appear in alphabetical order, 1-9. selecting these and copy/pasting the listing into an empty textedit document, results as such:

“copy 7
copy 4
copy 3
copy 8
copy 6
copy 5
copy 1
copy 2
copy 9”

clearly not alphabetical.

Regression:
none that i know of. selecting multiple files and opening them in their associated application opens them out of order. dragging multiple files from the finder into applications that accept dragged items imports/places them out of order, etc.

my hope is that this will be fixed, possibly, maybe, but i’m not holding my breath, in the new Leopard (OS X 10.5) Finder.

1 comment

  1. This has been bugging me ever since ‘upgrading’ to OS X four years ago. An inelegant work around is to drag the folder containing the items you want to copy into a blank Firefox window, which will then display all the files. You can then copy these and paste correctly. However Firefox can’t display more than the contents of one folder, making it of limited usefulness. This is something I do quite frequently and it would be really nice if Apple would fix the problem.