Ran into one of the nasty differences between Mac and Windows the other day - I was manually installing plugins on Eclipse when I suddenly found myself with a (nearly) empty Plugins folder. Being a switcher I am used to move a folder on-top of other folder (with identical name) and having the merged file structure as result. Not so on Mac OS X that by default deletes the existing folder with all files and then moves the dropped folder there!

Dialog in Windows XP to overwrite folder:



Dialog in Mac OS X to overwrite folder:



This issue has been extensively discussed here and here. My take on this:

Apple - fix it! Why? What is to most likely reason why someone would move a folder with files into an existing structure? Whatever you come up with - if you want to have the existing structure deleted in the first place - you did it before drag & dropping the folder!

And if you think I'm wrong - provide the user with the choice to select the method.

Unfortunately the Finder replacement - Path Finder - is behaving alike and is not yet convinced to add this option.

Update: Use the Merge Folders Script to get the wished result: add to Dock and drop the source folder on the script - provide the destination in the dialog and you are done - thx Bruce.

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Posted by Cedric on Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 1/22/2006 07:47:00 PM | Permalink