131–140 of 385 posts
That’s why I don’t even bother with the file name for photos. 1. Sync all equipments to the same clock. 2. Sort by Date Taken, if unavailable, sort by Date Created.
Yes, sounds to me like the user really wanted to sort by time created. And got used to sorting alphabetically as a poor proxy for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree. I think I could be convinced if there was a unique and universal representation for numeric values using characters. But we have so many textual representations of numeric values that I'm assuming the "mind-reading" goodness only works for a small subset. And the subset will be somewhat intuitive for developers but unlikely to be so for non-technical people. For example, does the order handle nu…
The sort rules are simple (1). Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. So for example version numbers (which must be massively more common than decimals in filenames) work correctly, and 5.9 is indeed smaller than 5.10 and the latter is not identical to 5.1 . Given that this idea goes back more than two decades, has been the default behaviour of the most used OSes for many years, with no ma…
Based on this description, I have no idea how the following would be sorted:
• photo.jpg
• photo1.jpg
• photo01.jpg
• photos.jpg
I got used to naming files/folders with leading zeros when I want them to be sorted alphabetically (for example payslips/invoices, etc). But I'm a tech guy, I know what does "alphabetically" mean in the tech world. And it probably is not what common folks mean when they think "alphabetically" outside the tech world. Edit: in fact, if I recall correctly, the proper term for this kind of sort (the one OP wants) is alph…
The natural numbers are ordered. Let me use its ordering instead of having to rely on an ad-hoc lexicographic fixed-length tuple representation of decimal digits, without any padding. My position is that numbers in filenames should always be considered atomically unless explicitly instructed otherwise.
If there were no issues of backwards compatibility, I would thus advocate for changing ls. Eza (maintained fork of Exa, Rust-based ls alternative) actually does sort this way by default, much to my delight.
I thought this was going to be a deep dive into what "alphabetical" means and how that's itself not a universal term between locales, what with so many different collation preferences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree. I think I could be convinced if there was a unique and universal representation for numeric values using characters. But we have so many textual representations of numeric values that I'm assuming the "mind-reading" goodness only works for a small subset. And the subset will be somewhat intuitive for developers but unlikely to be so for non-technical people. For example, does the order handle nu…
The sort rules are simple (1). Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. So for example version numbers (which must be massively more common than decimals in filenames) work correctly, and 5.9 is indeed smaller than 5.10 and the latter is not identical to 5.1 . Given that this idea goes back more than two decades, has been the default behaviour of the most used OSes for many years, with no ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the one true way: budget_09.csv, budget_10.csv
Then `budget_100.csv` comes by and now you need to rename 99 files.
I am sure that at some point someone thought the milliseconds should or should not be separated from the seconds and made that change without thinking through the consequences.
I have the same problem on Nemo. More specifically, I had made a small app that displayed files of a directory in alphabetical order, and then when I look at it in Nemo it isn't the same order because I didn't implement their smart algorithm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sort rules are simple (1). Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. So for example version numbers (which must be massively more common than decimals in filenames) work correctly, and 5.9 is indeed smaller than 5.10 and the latter is not identical to 5.1 . Given that this idea goes back more than two decades, has been the default behaviour of the most used OSes for many years, with no ma…
> Treat any consecutive sequence of digits as a number when sorting. Based on this description, I have no idea how the following would be sorted: • photo.jpg • photo1.jpg • photo01.jpg • photos.jpg
There's a user expectation that photo20.jpg comes after photo3.jpg.
There's no user expectation around whether photo1.jpg or photo01.jpg comes first. Just like there's no user expectation around whether photo1.jpg or Photo1.jpg comes first. Users also don't have the slightest idea about what order punctuation gets sorted in.
Just sort the things that matter in the way users expect (natural sort order) and come up with something reasonably consistent for the rest.
But it would frankly be great if most file browsers just let me sort photos based on metadata. But then I just end up in a dedicated photo browser, instead.