I know I’m usually driving the Finder pretty hard, but I think that’s a necessity, given its position as the center of macOS for power users, and its situation where it feels like Apple pretty much gave up on it.

But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as thoughtfully: text truncation.

This is what happens when you have a filename that’s too long:

This is really nicely done, for many reasons that work in lockstep:

• Finder cleverly elides text from the middle, knowing that both the ending of the last words (or digits!) of the file name, and its extension are important.
• Finder shows the full name in a tooltip. I’m surprised how many tools forget to do that, offering no easy explanation for the missing letters. Here are some examples from Notion and Bear, neither of which offers help on hover:

• Finder position the tooltip exactly atop the existing text. I think this is really clever: it avoids overlapping other useful information, and makes it faster to reorient yourself. Compare with, for example, AirTable:

• Lastly, Finder only shows the tooltip when it’s needed. This is something where so many places lose their way. For example, here’s Paper and Google Drive, throwing up a tooltip indiscriminately, even if it has absolutely nothing to add to the conversation:

Why does this last thing matter? Because unnecessary tooltips are distracting, cover information, and also – maybe most importantly – turn the interface into a minefield where no safe places remain to just mindlessly rest your cursor without worry.

This last thing is very fuzzy, but so important. You know how unpleasant a lot of articles are on the web these days, solely because you’re always on the edge about what’s going to happen while you read? Am I going to be moved up and down? When and where is the ad going to appear? When will I encounter a new subscription pop-up, and what will be the weird way to close it this time around?

I know you don’t literally tense your muscles while reading those, but I feel like in some sense, in the back of your head, there is always this unpleasant worry that you’re dealing with an unstable interface.

This is not a strong, but I feel a similar way about spurious tooltips; they make interfaces feel less stable. You rest your cursor, something jumps up at you, you get distracted and move your cursor instinctively to avoid it, and with any luck, you trigger yet another tooltip, and so on.

I will write more about this in the future. If you asked my former coworkers, I bet a significant portion would say “this guy gets angry at tooltips, like, all the time.” I promise I will get angry at tooltips more here. But today? Today, kudos to the Finder. It shows us that if you care, you can make this small moment feel really great and thoughtful – knowing that small moments multiplied in the thousands are no longer small.