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When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

sebastiano.tronto.net

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Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#151

Post by AlienRobot »

lblume wrote: post #138
AlienRobot wrote: post #125

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.

I fail to see how this is a "problem"? You implemented a sorting mechanism that was useful to your application, while Nemo implemented another which as this thread demonstrates seems to be much more useful and intuitive for the average user. This is also of course not specific to Nemo, as no 'modern' file manager on Linux sorts filenames like it's 1980 and all you are able to feasibly do is step through the bytes.

Nemo isn't some random app a teenager made. It's the default file manager of a desktop OS. I expect it to cover more use cases.

I expect the same for other file managers on Linux. Although I must say I'm generally let down by Linux software.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#152

Post by whatevertrevor »

Certhas wrote: post #101
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

Agreed.What's more, the idea that people learn to put leading zeros is wrong and impractical, unless you know in advance how many digits you need. When you go from version 5.9.17 to 5.10.0 you don't go back and relabel every existing folder as 5.09.17. The today standard way of sorting is well defined, unambiguous, and natural. Lexographic has its place, but user facing interfaces ain't it.

Had this in the Beat Saber mod manager recently. The game released 1.40.10 and my mod manager suddenly thought that game went backwards from 1.40.9

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#153

Post by coldtea »

II2II wrote: post #90
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the classic filenames with decimal points and scientific notation in them, so common...

Here's a different scenario: filenames with dates in them. Consider September Budget and October Budget . September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is n…

>September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is no such thing as natural

Yeah, but there is such a thing as "give a predictable and consistent way I can name the files so that they sort as I want everywhere" which (if different OSes don't try to be "smart") would have been to prefix them with the numeric date zero padded.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#154

Post by armchairhacker »

ploxiln wrote: post #102
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…

But the alternative would be a surprise to people who assume "by name" will order numbers, including those who are new to technology (and I think most non-technical people who sort things manually unknowingly order numbers).

We want to minimize surprises and mysteries, but computers have so much hidden complexity it's impossible to eliminate them. If users were shown a full description of how every feature on their computer worked before using it, they'd quickly start ignoring the descriptions. There should probably be a tooltip or "manual entry" for "by name" for those who are curious, and it should never be labeled "alphabetical" because it's not. But cases like the author's, where he assumes a feature works differently than most people (including the designers) assume, can't be helped.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#155

Post by coldtea »

arccy wrote: post #95
II2II wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different scenario: filenames with dates in them. Consider September Budget and October Budget . September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is n…

the one true way: budget_09.csv, budget_10.csv

Even better, I'd prefer to have more semantic meaning, and for budget-2025-09.csv, buget-2025-10.csv to work everywhere...

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#156

Post by lisper »

mtoner23 wrote: post #142
lisper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can say that about every single design decision made about every product. No, that's not true. Many aspects of my computer's UI are user-configurable.

Yes but not every single one of them

Obviously. All I'm saying is that this particular decision ought not to have been taken from the user. Real alphabetical order is not an unreasonable thing to want.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#157

Post by brimstedt »

Isnt the author confusing "alphabetical sorting" with "ASCII sorting"?

Afaik there is no universal way to handle numbers in alphabetical lists. Sometimes numbers some before letters, sometimes after, etc.

A digit is not a part of the alphabet, right?

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#158

Post by lstamour »

ploxiln wrote: post #102
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…

I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…

I might be wrong on this, but I vaguely recall that on macOS back when you could commonly option-click to reveal advanced options, if you held option when clicking a sort it would change how it sorted from alphabetical to lexical or vice versa. I’m not a thousand percent sure of it, though, I think when I needed it I was able to set a directory preference via terminal to change how a specific directory was sorted and it was an option there. MacOS had (or has) a lot of buried options which I presume date back to its origins as a Unix as well as a convenience to its developers. A lot of the command line utilities were hacked calls to graphical settings code though, so it wasn’t very stable version to version as the UI calls changed and nobody prioritized non-UI bug fixes or breaking changes. These days CLI is nearly forgotten or assumed to be an exploit vector - see Screen Time data for example.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#159

Post by coldtea »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #117
arccy wrote: post #95

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.

Given that 09 and 10 refer to months, that wont ever gonna be a problem. And if you want to differentiate them years too, you can prefix with 2025- or put them in a 2025/, 2026/ etc folder.

Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

#160

Post by phendrenad2 »

I think if we (in our industry in general) had REAL agile, and not pseudo-waterfall "the designers design it, the engineers implement it, QA QA's it, and then we lay everyone off because they're no longer needed" (but, loophole alert! We did daily standups and used Jira, so it was "agile" the whole time!), then we'd have a snowball's chance in hell of actually having a reasonable solution to this. Off the top of my head, this seems like something that should be a setting in control panel. But, because everyone assumes (contra to agile) that the designers "got it right the first time", this kind of improvement can't happen.
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