The file picker has always been one of the weakest parts of our GUI paradigm, and it has been since the Mac.
Navigating file system via GUIs is slow, painful, and for me takes a ton of cognitive effort after a short amount of time of accumulating files. Coming up with a system for organizing files is kind of hard in itself. Reorganizing as the number of files outgrows the system is also painful.
And choosing a place to save a file is often the best time to start a reorganization. But if I save a file in a new location, having to switch apps and now go back to that same spot in the hierarchy and reorganize is painful.
I don't have a good solution, just complaints, unfortunately. But after ~50 years of GUIs and hierarchical file systems I'm surprised somebody more clever than me hasn't come up with a better solution.
This comment reminds me when Apple revamped Finder to include "All My Files". To me it felt like they were giving up. "FINE! Can't find something? HERE'S EVERYTHING!"
These sort of pseudo-directories honestly bother me more than just plain old hierarchy. For example on Windows, "This PC/Documents" is really "%userprofile%/Documents", but to get to %userprofile% you have to go to C:\Users\<username>. But there's TONS of other stuff that lives in %userprofile%
And it hasn’t evolved with cloud/sandboxing/magic-paths/whatever. Like today on the Mac I used the popup directory path to try to navigate to the parent directory (since it showed it to me, and it was selectable) and it couldn’t; it just threw me to my home folder as if that was my request. I can only assume it was some weird cloud thing but when path navigation itself is a question mark we have problems.
Navigating file system via GUIs is slow, painful, and for me takes a ton of cognitive effort after a short amount of time of accumulating files. Coming up with a system for organizing files is kind of hard in itself. Reorganizing as the number of files outgrows the system is also painful.
And choosing a place to save a file is often the best time to start a reorganization. But if I save a file in a new location, having to switch apps and now go back to that same spot in the hierarchy and reorganize is painful.
I don't have a good solution, just complaints, unfortunately. But after ~50 years of GUIs and hierarchical file systems I'm surprised somebody more clever than me hasn't come up with a better solution.