> How did I not know this?

Because it isn't obvious, or even really very easy to find.

To be fair the average user doesn't ever need to see hidden folders. Who cares what the defaults are, set your Mac up however you want, I'm sure everyone here is plenty capable.

Also, people will spend days customizing their Linux systems, but think OS X needs to be exactly the way they want it out of the box. Why is that? I agree the software quality has declined over the past few years, but many people here seem to be nitpicking.

Dude, it's even in the Finder's menu. Go > Go to Folder (⇧⌘G)

"dude", yes, I know. Once found, nothing is hard to find.

But it's shitty UX. You can navigate to folders, except this arbitrary list of them that you can't control, in which case you go somewhere else to navigate to them.

And the 3 or 4 ways to view the folders, in (at least) one of them you can't create a new folder, but others you can. Brilliant.

If you search "shortcuts for Finder" in your preferred search engine, this is one of the first that will be listed.

You can also do: cd /tmp; open .

Never knew about the dot. I always use open $(pwd)...

. = current directory

.. = parent directory

Or just `open /tmp`

I'm asking myself the same question!

Here's the funny thing: Click the Go menu in Finder, and look down at the bottom where it says Go to Folder...

See the shortcut? Yup, it's Command-Shift-G.

I have no idea why I never paid attention to that before.