File managers have a curious, some would say unique, place in desktop computerdom. They seem to be only slightly behind text editors in their ability to trigger religious conflict among true believers. It’s not hard to find instances of one user reacting to another’s choice of file manager with, “You use what???”, a situation that can quickly put the “personal” (as in ad hominem) back into personal computing.
File managers have a curious, some would say unique, place in desktop computerdom. They seem to be only slightly behind text editors in their ability to trigger religious conflict among true believers. It’s not hard to find instances of one user reacting to another’s choice of file manager with, “You use what???”, a situation that can quickly put the “personal” (as in ad hominem) back into personal computing.
File managers are also like text editors in that their users are very prone to exhibiting the “baby duck syndrome.” This quaint term refers to the way baby ducks will “imprint” on the first entity they’re exposed to for any length of time (be it a duck, a human, or whatever), and treat it as its mother. Editor and file manager users are much the same way — they imprint on one set of features, keystrokes, and appearance, and often don’t even consider looking for an alternative. I’m no different from anyone else in this regard — I still configure the function keys in any editor I use to match the set I learned at IBM about a billion years ago on the mainframe editor XEDIT, and I always set the colors for marked blocks to the same…
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