Finder’s elite eliding

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…