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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”

#161

Post by yndoendo »

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…

What is the reason to append a textual file name with a number? User Experience?

They are magic numbers. Maybe a serial ID, date stamp with more magic, revision, release, ...

Magic Number land has 10 > 9 in the above.

9 > 10 is only possible when removing the Magic Number and morph into mealiness text.

At the moment I cannot think of any magic number where 9 > 10.

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

#162

Post by jeroenhd »

If you don't like the default natural sorting order, you can just change it in Dolphin. Settings > Configure Dolphin > View > Content Display > select anything other than "natural". You can even pick if you want case sensitivity or not.

The OS doesn't think you're too stupid to understand sorting, it relies on you being smart enough to figure out where the setting is located. In this case, four levels deep is probably too much to ask from users if they will write an entire blog post like this before finding the toggle.

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

#163

Post by bloak »

The correct sorting algorithm is described here: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/dpkg-dev/deb-version.5.e...

I was joking. Really I would sort file names lexicographically. But the way Debian sorts version numbers is interesting and seems like a good way of handling that particular situation.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

derriz wrote: post #143
Certhas wrote: post #103

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…

> The sort rules are simple In considering the simplicity of the rule, I think you're using a developers perspective here where we automatically classify numbers and have a clear mental model of the separation between value and representation. But I'm not sure how simple it would be to explain to a non-technical user why size_5, size_10 and size_15 are in order but size_0.25, size_0.5 and size_0.75 are out-of-order.…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

coldtea wrote: post #153
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…

> 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…

Date is already in the metadata, it doesn't need to be in the filename.

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

#166

Post by userbinator »

The most irritating circumstance for this is looking for files named with a hash:

    3ea4f...
    ...
    97dce...
    ...
    126b9...
This is one of the settings I immediately turn off on Windows via the registry key mentioned in the other comments here.

I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead of trying to read your mind.

These days, it's more like "trying to change your mind". I absolutely hate the "the user is wrong" authoritarian mentality that unfortunately has infected a ton of software, even open-source.

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

#168

Post by lsaferite »

plorkyeran wrote: post #31
JoshTriplett wrote: post #3

I almost always want the version-sorting that's being presented in this article, rather than an "alphabetical" sort. But on the other hand, it absolutely seems like a valid bug that this is presented as an "alphabetical" sort, rather than something like "alphabetic/numeric" or similar. In other words, a problem of labeling rather than one of sorting.

It’s not being presented as an alphabetical sort, though. The author assumed that sorting by name meant an alphabetical sort, but that’s not how it’s labeled.

In fairness, sorting by name has, for many years, been an alphabetic sort. Doing a mixed alpha/numeric sort is a relatively new thing.

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

#169

Post by amelius »

Another problem which annoys me to no end is that most file managers and file selection boxes put directories before files.

This makes it hard to find the file that was most recently changed, for example. Which is an action that is extremely common. (In fact, why does my file manager not have a most-recently-used shortcut?)

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

#170

Post by sebtron »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #73
epistasis wrote: post #40

This is reminding me of the whole "Worse is better" essay and debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916370 The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want. For their purposes, they've assumed something about the implementation, to the point that a convenience feature is actually a misfeature for them. But the author her…

> The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want. I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?

> I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?

I prefer the strict ASCII / Unicode sorting (all capitals first, then all lowercase).

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