251–260 of 385 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that's not alphabetical order. It's great if DEs build this and give it a name. It's even better if they have a different one that deals with SI prefixes too. But it's not good if "alphabetical order" means that.
What desktop environment called this alphabetical?
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 will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10". I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. (And then potentially go come back later and add even more leading zeroes once the maximum number reaches three digits.) --- I split all of my audiob…
> ... it would be great if I could just trust that every device will understand numbers.
Strings are not numbers, even if some part of their content "looks like a number."
> I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10".
Problem is, this is your preference for a specific situation. Which may not be another person's preference in the same situation nor yours in a different situation.
So what are programs to do?
Display strings in a consistent, documented, manner. Which is lexicographical ordering in all cases lacking meta-data to indicate otherwise.
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> 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
I just tried it on Mac, its sorted in the order you listed. Extending it a bit, the order is: photo1 photo01 photo001 photo0001 photo2 So the shorter representation of the same number comes first. It does make intuitive sense to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10". I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. (And then potentially go come back later and add even more leading zeroes once the maximum number reaches three digits.) --- I split all of my audiob…
> I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. > ... it would be great if I could just trust that every device will understand numbers. Strings are not numbers, even if some part of their content "looks like a number." > I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file manager…
IMO, "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent. I'm not sure if it's documented—I've never needed to look up the documentation—but if it's not, the developers could certainly fix that.
> this is your preference for a specific situation.
Sure, but we generally make decisions based on which situations we think will be most common. I think having ten or more things (screenshots, audio samples, whatever) named "Thing 1" – "Thing 10" in a folder is extremely common. And if Thing 10 comes before 9, it's really annoying!
Let's say I have a directory of 32 numbered files. Under the author's preferred sorting method, they'll get displayed:
1
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
2
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
3
31
32
4
5
6
7
8
9
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 will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file managers to sort "9" before "10". I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. (And then potentially go come back later and add even more leading zeroes once the maximum number reaches three digits.) --- I split all of my audiob…
Amen.
> I split all of my audiobooks into chapters. I use the format "Chapter 01.mp3" (or "Chapter 001.mp3" when there are > 99 chapters) because some (all?) MP3 players are too stupid to sort numbers properly and I want my audiobooks to work everywhere.
Well, some car and kitchen radio manufacturers will probably never get this right. In my car (which tends not to be brand new) they even messed up UTF-8 chars, which gets me laughing every time a track has them. It's become a running gag with my wife, "Oh, listen up, it's &%=?! again".
> (all?)
Well, I kind of hate to say this, but Apple got this right with the iPods. They even regarded the metadata fields `sort-*` (e.g. sort-album), movement-name (for series) and movement-index (for part). With these fields they really group and sort my audio books as I expect it to be.
I even wrote my own software to fill these tags appropriately, so that I don't need to split my audio books. I'm pretty happy using `m4b` files - an mp4 / m4a container with chapter support, which is supported perfectly fine on my iPod Nano 7g and my Android Phone (using Audiobookshelf[1] and Voice[2]). After all these years, the iPod Nano 7g to me is the PERFECT portable audio book player with 2 exceptions: Repairability and the proprietary Apple headphone remote protocol [3].
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?
> Isnt the author confusing "alphabetical sorting" with "ASCII sorting"? But it's actually not ASCII sorting either! ASCII sorting would mean 'Z' comes before 'a' and I assume even the author doesn't want that! No matter what, there are going to be hidden tricks!
I don't know about the author, but that's exactly what many others who know about ASCII expect, including me. Digits, then uppercase, then lowercase.
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 don't. I want string sorting to be string sorting. Filenames are strings.
I wouldn't mind if there was an option to tell the file manager to do this "wrangle numbers out of strings and treat them as numbers" thing--so that I could turn that option off, and others who want that behavior could turn it on.
But for this to be the default, without even a way to change it (except in Dolphin, it looks like)? That seems daft to me.
Btw, I use Trinity Desktop, and I just verified that in TDE's version of Konqueror, the sorting of filenames is the same as for ls on the command line, e.g., 'item-10.txt' comes before 'item-9.txt'. Another good reason for me not to have switched to a more "modern" desktop.
> The author's situation is extremely rare
I don't think it is. But that's really beside the point. The computer is my tool. If it doesn't do what I want or expect it to do, it's a bad tool for me. And designers of tools shouldn't be making assumptions about how I want to use it. They should be giving me ways to tune it to how I want to use it.
> "mind-reading" is really helpful in ways we take for granted, like autosave.
I don't use autosave either. I don't want the computer to assume when I want to save a file. The computer is too stupid to know that.
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 target audience
Which is it? Those should be different groups.
"Most people" have incoherent ideas that can't even be used. So instead a designer cherry-picks some ideas - setting the agenda - and declares that they're popular. That doesn't make them good ideas. Also, "most people" are easily influenced and will like the terrible things that they've been told to like.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't want to put leading zeroes before every all the single digit numbers in my file names. > ... it would be great if I could just trust that every device will understand numbers. Strings are not numbers, even if some part of their content "looks like a number." > I will add that I'm plenty "smart" enough to understand that "10" comes before "9" in a strictly alphabetical sense, and I still want my file manager…
> Display strings in a consistent, documented, manner. IMO, "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent. I'm not sure if it's documented—I've never needed to look up the documentation—but if it's not, the developers could certainly fix that. > this is your preference for a specific situation. Sure, but we generally make decisions based on which situations we think will be most…
Are you sure about that?
So how do you suggest handling hexadecimal numbers?
Or octal numbers?
What about binary numbers?
What about file names with portions of a date and/or time?
How is a program supposed to know any of the above?
Assuming any of the filesystems I am aware of is in use, those names are strings having one or two characters. They are not "numbered files."
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And where do you sort the letter ä? (After a is correct in German, but I think Swedish does it differently.)
That's why we have all this LC_* stuff in Linux, which you can configure to your needs: export LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE" export LC_MONETARY="de_DE" export LC_PAPER="de_DE" export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_RESPONSE="en_US.UTF-8" export LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 Mix in your Swedish or Swaheli, maybe even the Vatican State: e.g. de_DE, sw_TZ, it_VA (not guaranteed ;-).