Finder Gripe: Group Selecting is Counter Intuitive...

[dahacouk]

Group Selecting Items from a List is Counter Intuitive in Finder (and Mail, Address Book, ...)

Does anybody else suffer with me on this one?...

When you are group selecting items from a list with shift - such as a list of emails in Mail or and list of files/folders in Finder or names in Address Book - the selecting behaviour seems very wrong.

Try this... take Finder, in single column mode, and go to a folder that has a few files in it. Select an item (file or folder) with a single click near the middle so that it's highlighted (blue). Now hold down the shift key and arrow up so that a bunch of files get selected (blued).

Now say you've gone too far and you want to come back on yourself. What's the most intuitive thing to do? You continue holding down the shift key and simply start pressing the down arrow key to deselect, right? Wrong!

That action (hitting a shifted down arrow) will select those items below the first item that you highlighted. Now, that's what I call really counter intuitive and very confusing. In effect, the cursor has jumped in hyper-space when you switch arrow keys.

This is really frustrating!

Is this the best way of describing the problem?

Cheers Daniel

 

[Jay42]

I tried it... I guess I agree with you, but I can't say I ever really use the arrow keys to select stuff.

 

[iMeowbot]

Not sure that it helps any, but here's another long complaint about the same thing.

 

[dahacouk]

Not sure that it helps any, but here's another long complaint about the same thing.

Wow! That's a real long rant for sure. Many thanks for letting me know. I'm glad I'm not the only one!

Cheers Daniel

 

[Unorthodox]

That is annoying.
You know what else is annoying?
Hold down shift and option, press up arrow key and down arrow key. Then hold down command and press up or down.
I did that in my applications folder.
The result:

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

This really irritates me too...I used to do group selecting everday in Windows and its difficult to throw the habbit, since its useless in OS X (IMO).

PS: Switched more than five yeras ago...

 

[mkrishnan]

Yeah, that's a known but very annoying issue... I don't see the real value in it working the way it does work.

 

[Peterkro]

Yay a problem in OSX the is a genuine pain in the bum,it doesn't happen often but it annoys the hell out of me,

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

Yay a problem in OSX the is a genuine pain in the bum,it doesn't happen often but it annoys the hell out of me,

It happens as often as you utilize the feature. Some of us are plauged by it, and others have learned to get by with with it, some don't use it at all.

 

[dahacouk]

Letting Apple know we don't like it...

Great! OK. It's not just me!

What's the best way to let Apple know that we think this is a problem?

- An online petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/ ?
- A bug filed through ADC at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ ?
- A feedback report through http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/ ?
- Another way?...

Cheers Daniel