Move or Copy
July 23rd, 2006
A useful Finder tip from Apple’s site:
While this screenshot is clearly of the wrong dialog, the actual dialog is only labeled halfway correctly:
Which to believe… The dialog title or the text beneath it…
Because multiple file operation dialogs are combined into one, the dialog would have to be titled “Move & Copy” or something similar when both are running.
File a radar.
The fix would be easy… change the nib (or whatever) to have a dialog named “Move” This behavior dates back as far as I used the Mac, at least to system 6, probably all the way to 1984. The default when you drag a file to another disk is “copy”; hold down command and you get to move. That default makes total sense to me; if you move between locations on the same device, you are most likely moving the file; moving between disks is rarer than copying, so thats the default.
Maybe it could be different now, but i have 14 years of muscle memory. I do agree that changing the dialog title would be better; I am so used to this by now I hadn’t even noticed the progress bar was titled “copy”
Im sure when they only had had 64K of rom, this seemed like a tiny little nuisance.
This is how it has been since at least 1992 (Sys 6.0.8) and I suspect it dates back to the 128K days. I believe the opration taking place here is a “move” not a copy, certainly not both (the only difference between the two is what happens to the source file.) I’m sure the “one progress bar to rule them” system happened when they had less than half a meg of disk storage and 192K of memory of any sort (rom+ram) and a “move” dialog would have cost them like, 35 bytes.
Hopefully the fix is as simple as ading a new dialog to the Finder’s NIB. Or even using the power of Carbon (right? not cocoa? because the Finder engineers hate themselves as much as us?) to just change the title of the window.