Comment 94 for bug 48671

"The proposal was to allow renaming by clicking on a file, not to copy Windows's implementation exactly -- if the implementation is poor in Windows, that doesn't mean it would be in Nautilus. For example, Mac OS X allows click to rename, and I've never heard a Mac user complain that this feature ever does anything but allow users to rename files when and only when they intend to do so. Please do not argue against a feature by pointing at the same feature implemented poorly somewhere else; we should take it as an opportunity for us to do well what they do poorly, and outperform the others in a tangible, measurable way. Throwing up our hands and basically saying "we'll never get it right if they can't" is quite unhelpful."

The obvious difference between Windows and Mac is that most Windows users are very accustomed to learning right-click, while Mac users traditionally have not used right-click since they didn't have a second mouse button. So it feels like Mac has this feature out of necessity, not because click-to-activate is somehow better than right-click.