I literally went the opposite. I switched to OSX soon after the Intel transition and loved it, after a decade in Windows land. I honestly just much prefer the look and feel of Apple products and software. I find them more enjoyable to use, consistent, more intelligently thought out and much less hassle.
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)
I've tried to "go mac" about 3 times now, at quite a bit of expense, and the horrible and endless well of failure that is Finder continues to rebuff me. Even as Explorer continues to change and ends up with some weird corners, it's such a much better and more efficient file manager.
I'll find myself going weeks, enjoying my rMBP, then I'll need to do some heavy duty file management and end up in Finder-hell and immediately wish I was using something better. DirectoryOpus, Midnight Commander, anything.
It says something when the CLI is not only faster to use, but more user-friendly and discoverable than the GUI.
In fact, I'm about to start work on a bunch of file management and I've been putting it off for a week just because I don't want to interact with Finder.
Gahhh, it's a terrible terrible piece of software.
I always read about people hating Finder, and I never understand why.
There are some things that I can't live without: being able to drag a file or folder into a file open/save dialog (try doing this in Windows! HOHO), and the column view. It really makes file management a breeze, and I rarely drop into the Terminal, unless I'm doing some heavy-duty renaming, or stuff like that.
Could you elaborate on the Finder problems you're encountering?
I could probably provide you with pages of issues but they all bundle into a couple of major categories
1 - unbelievably poor context presentation, e.g. if I paste? where in the file system will something end up? Who knows? Where am I in the filesystem? I can guess! Is it correct? not usually. How about let's play the game of which kind of file is this? Because filenames usually end up with a '...' somewhere in them and I have to fiddle with Finder every single time to get it wide enough to stop truncating filenames so I can figure out which file is "P1250416.JPG" vs "P1250417.JPG". Folders mix in with filenames when sorted so navigating up and down the tree takes forever (and is harder to do keyboarding). And on and on and on.
2 - completely nonstandard keyboarding and navigation, e.g. ENTER to rename, cmd+o or cmd+down to open a file? really? In which way are either of those possible intuitive? It appears Finder is trying to follow some impossibly ancient keyboard shortcut system that was probably put in place 30 years ago and doesn't make any sense at all.
Here's a typical use-case for me. I just shot about 3,000 photos and I want to do a quick pass on the photos and delete bad photos and move photos of a certain kind (photos with a certain subject) into another folder. In explorer it's a matter of hitting "enter" then "right" until I see one I don't like then hitting "delete" to remove it then continuing with "right" until I find more to delete or finish the bunch. Moving ones with a specific subject involves me ctrl+mouswheel until the thumbnails are as big as possible so I can see the subjects, then ctrl+lmb on all the ones I want to move then ctrl+x, move into the folder, ctrl+v (and now they're all sorted and not scattered all over the place like in Finder and I moved them using the completely system consistent cut-paste keyboard hotkeys) and alt+left to go back (just like a browser). Other niceties like being able to maximize and then restore back to the default window size with a couple mouseclicks are also smoother.
In Finder all of this becomes work instead of a few minutes of repetitive keypushing. I can almost do the entire workflow without a mouse in Explorer, and where I have to mouse it kind of makes sense (picking specific items from a group) over a keyboard. But in Finder, just to get started, I have to buy and install a couple pieces of software.
Sure most of these things can be "fixed". If I install this or that extension, and customize finder in this or that way and remap such and such keyboard hotkey I can kind of end up with a sane workflow and filenames I can actually see. But I shouldn't have to fix shipping software. Everytime I open Finder I'm asking myself if anybody at Apple actually uses it.
Take a look on the internet for people complaining about Finder and most of the complaints are more or less along the same lines. The complaints are consistent and have been going on for years. Solutions have been hacks since forever as well and usually involve installing $100 of replacements, addons or fixes.
What's amazing to me is that these problems don't exist in any other GUI file manager I've ever used, from the Amiga to my TI calculators. Finder is just rubbish.
I can go weeks without acknowledging the existence of a filesystem. I do "file management" literally never. Just throw everything in my Dropbox folder and Command-Space to find it when I want it back.
I see my current project's tree in Sublime Text all the time, but I rarely if ever use Finder proper.
Yeah, Spotlight is pretty good. I have too many files that need organizing to follow your workflow, but after a couple minutes of fighting with finder to find something I can usually just spotlight it.
Xcode 6 (the latest version) has a really good set of features but there's a huge number of crash bugs all through the app (and supporting tools like Instruments). Depending on what you're doing, you can get stuck in constant crash loops.
Fortunately, Xcode keeps perpetual auto-backups; otherwise you'd lose your changes multiple times per day.
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)