Mac OS X’s Finder: Selection highlighting and dragging in list view

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh, Mail
March 24th, 2009 • 11:09 am

It’s sad but true. Ever since Apple switched us from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, the list view mode in the Finder has been treated as a second-class citizen. It has been buggy, neglected, abused, and more.

Unfortunately, nearly ten years later, there are still daily reminders of this class struggle in the Finder in Mac OS X 10.5.

Here’s one striking example. Say you are viewing a folder’s contents in column view in the Finder and you click on one of the items to select it:

Selection in column view

As this screen shot indicates, you can actually select the item by clicking anywhere in the line formed by the item in the column view list. In other words, you don’t have to click on the item’s name itself in order to select it. The entire line functions as the target area for selecting the item through a mouse click.

And that’s the way it should be. The file name itself is a target of variable width, depending on the length of the name. If the name is very short, requiring the user to click on the name itself to select the item would make the process unnecessarily difficult. Since a click on the item’s line beyond the item’s name, in the empty area on the right, cannot possibly serve any other purpose, it is interpreted by the Finder as a click on the item itself, and therefore the click causes the item to become selected.

(On the other hand, if you want to click on the item a second time in order to make the name editable, you have to click on the name itself. This makes sense, as the target here is clearly not the item, but the item’s name itself. Clicking a second time on the empty area on the right does nothing.)

Now since the logic here is that the empty area on the right-hand side of the item is a proxy for the item itself, it follows that I should now be able to click-and-drag on that empty area on the right to drag the item itself. And indeed that is what happens when I click-and-drag on the empty area:

Click-and-drag on empty area

So far so good. Everything makes sense and is intuitive.

Now let’s switch to list view and attempt to reproduce the same steps.

First, I click on the empty area on the right-hand side of the item I want to select. Since clicking on that empty area in list view cannot possibly serve any other purpose, it should select the item itself, even though I am not clicking on its name. And indeed it does:

Selection in list view

Once again, the empty area serves as a proxy for the item itself.

But now consider what happens when I attempt to click-and-drag on this empty area in order to drag the selected item:

Click-and-drag on empty area

Argh! Instead of allowing me to click-and-drag in order to drag the selected item, Mac OS X’s Finder interprets this click-and-drag operation, for some reason, as a wish to extend the current selection in the direction of the dragging movement.

Where is this coming from all of a sudden? Not only is it inconsistent with the behaviour in column view, when there is absolutely no reason to introduce such an inconsistency. But it is also inconsistent with the behaviour of the single click in the empty area even in list view, which indicates that the empty area to the right does act as a proxy for the item. If it’s a proxy, then I should be able to click-and-drag on the empty area in order to drag the selected item.

It simply does not make sense. And it’s maddening, because the inconsistency between the behaviour in column view and the behaviour in list view means that it is impossible for the user to get used to it. How is the user supposed to add to his “muscle memory” for mouse movements a mental check to first determine whether the window is in list view or in column view? It is impossible.

Of course, it is interesting to note that the inconsistency does not mean that the empty area on the right no longer functions as proxy for the item when you attempt to click-and-drag on an already selected item in list view. It just means that click-and-drag on the empty area next to a file’s name has a different behaviour depending on whether you are in list view or in column view.

The differences can be recapped as follows:

  1. In column view, if you click-and-drag on the empty area next to a item’s name and that item is not already selected, click-and-drag works as a mechanism to create a continuous selection of multiple items.
  2. In column view, if you click-and-drag on the empty area next to a item’s name and that item is already selected, click-and-drag works as a mechanism to drag the item itself.
  3. In list view, if you click-and-drag on the empty area next to a item’s name and that item is not already selected, click-and-drag works as a mechanism to create a continuous selection of multiple items.
  4. In column view, if you click-and-drag on the empty area next to a item’s name and that item is already selected, click-and-drag also works as a mechanism to create a continuous selection of multiple items.

And that, in a nutshell, is why things are wrong here. There should not be any differences between list view and column view as far as the meaning of click-and-drag on the empty area next to an item’s name is concerned.

It should also be noted that the list of messages in the Mail Viewer window in Mac OS X’s Mail application suffers from the same flaws as the list view in the Finder. Here again, if you click-and-drag on the empty area next to a message’s subject or date or sender, click-and-drag works as a mechanism to create a continuous selection of multiple items regardless of whether the message is already selected or not.

There is a small difference in Mail, however: If you click-and-drag in a more or less horizontal direction to the left or to the right on the empty area next to the subject/date/sender of an already selected message, then click-and-drag does work as a mechanism to drag the selected message itself.

I suppose there is a logic to this variation depending on the direction of the dragging—and one that is somewhat similar to the weird behaviour when dragging tabs in the tab bar in a Safari 3.x window. The weird behaviour in Safari 3.x has actually been eliminated in Safari 4, so maybe there is some hope that, slowly but surely, Apple is coming to see the senselessness of these restrictions and inconsistencies.

But whether this will ever be enough to cause Apple to fix the problems in list view in the Finder, I do not know. I don’t have much hope.


One Response to “Mac OS X’s Finder: Selection highlighting and dragging in list view”

  1. Betalogue » OS X 10.9’s Finder: Wrong text colour in selection highlighting in list view says:

    […] OS X, which is that list view tends to be treated as a second-class citizen. I’ve written about this in the past, referring to various bugs in OS X’s Finder that are […]