One thing macOS does better than Windows

Don’t get me wrong, I like Windows. I’ve been using different versions of Windows for years, and I don’t see it as a bad operating system.

But there are just some things that make more sense on macOS, and there is one thing I want to mention in particular:

File Management

Deleting Files

Why on earth does Windows allow me to delete files by just pressing one button? Deleting files is something that really should not happen by accident, but that is what sometimes happens to me on Windows. You just have to miss the enter key by half a centimeter, and you accidentally delete all your files instead of opening them. Sure, you have the bin to restore the deleted files, but it still makes much more sense to have to press two keys to delete files. That’s what macOS does, where you have to press command and backspace to remove the selected files.

File preview

This makes so much sense on macOS. You can get a quick preview of a file by just pressing the space bar. You can see the content of the most common file types without having to open them in a separate application. This is especially useful for photos or PDF files. If you want to go through a bunch of photos and delete the ones you don’t like: You just select the first file in your list of photos, press the space bar, and then you can navigate through your photos using the arrow keys, and it will automatically switch the preview to the file you navigated to. Then you can just delete single files using command + backspace without even leaving preview mode. That’s pretty convenient. Windows File Explorer doesn’t have such functionality.

Renaming files

Okay, both operating systems allow me to edit the name of a file by just pressing one button. But the fact that the button is the enter key on macOS instead of F2 on Windows gives the point to macOS. Not only is the enter key easier to reach, but often there is a different primary action assigned to the F2 key on a lot of keyboards, like changing the screen brightness, for example. So most of the time, you would have to press a separate FN key together with F2 to change the file name.

Opening files

This one might be quite subjective, but I think the way you open a file is another thing that makes more sense on macOS than Windows.

In my opinion, opening one or, especially, multiple files should be an intentional process. You don’t want to accidentally open the one hundred photos you just selected because you hit enter when you actually wanted to press delete. If that happens, you unintentionally load either a hundred files into one program or, even worse, a hundred separate windows for each file. This can destroy your workflow and be seriously problematic on low-end machines that can’t handle such a request performance-wise.

That’s why macOS’ “press-two-keys-approach” is way more appropriate. You just need to press command + O to open the selected files, and you’re done. It is still not overcomplicated and easy to remember because “O” stands for open in this command, but it adds an extra level of protection against user error.

And if you just want to get the content of a file as fast as possible, you can still use the preview by pressing the space bar.