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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”

#311

Post by sandblast »

hakfoo wrote: post #272
coldtea wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Budget 2025-09.ods and Budget 2025-10.ods would sort reliably. The options explode infinitely if you start trying to guess what people want in terms of semantic grouping. One user might want to see "September Budget" beside "September Sales Projections" and "September Calendar", and another might want to group it with "October Budget" and "November Budget". If you have simple, stupid, but predictable tools, people ca…

You can easily disable grouping in Windows Explorer.

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

#312

Post by kuschku »

xigoi wrote: post #136
NekkoDroid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then `budget_100.csv` comes by and now you need to rename 99 files.

It’s been about two thousand years since the number of months in a year has been increased. I don’t think we’re getting 88 new ones anytime soon.

And it's been about 25 years since we had to increase the number of digits for a year.

budget_97.csv, budget_98.csv, budget_99.csv, budget_2000.csv

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

#313

Post by Jaxan »

eloisius wrote: post #270
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #196

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…

And maybe someone else uses “American” style dates in their file names mm-dd-YYYY, can those also be put in correct order for those users?

That is just silly notation used by a minority in this world ;-)

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

#314

Post by rickdeckard »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #254
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #252

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…

> "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent.

How about decimal numbers, are they strings or still numbers?

How about version numbers with multiple dots?

How about decimal numbers of a different locale, e.g. you list the folder from a remote machine with filenames of a different locale?

The problem with such semi-consistent schemes is that they are still guess-work, they may make some cases better for some people, but other cases practically unusable because the system doesn't have sufficient information to handle all scenarios consistently.

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

#315

Post by arcxi »

ahoka wrote: post #308
cesarb wrote: post #54

> But nope, this is not it, because the good old ls sorts my files correctly Did the author try "ls -v"? It would probably give the exact same order these file managers used.

ls -l does not sort, so I think the author is just very confused?

GNU ls sorts alphabetically "if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified".

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

#316

Post by Sammi »

> I have also found a setting to fix Dolphin’s behavior, but it was very much buried into its many configuration options.

KDE wins again. It's my favorite desktop environment, because it has defaults that are friendly to noobs, but it also get out of your way and lets you change things if you want.

The trend is for other desktop environments to be either/or. Either they are super simple and noob friendly, or they are super technical and have a steep learning curve and you get to configure everything - but only via text config. Maybe Cosmic looks like it's going the same route as KDE, where it's trying to bridge the gap.

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

#317

Post by Yizahi »

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…

How is that right, when file explorer picks an arbitrary character in the middle(!) of the filename and sorts by it? Say, I have a file987name.txt and list5.txt, so sorting by name ascending a file explorer would for whatever reason decide to sort by fifth character, so that list5 would lower than file987name, because 5 is lower than 9, via some twisted logic. How is that normal in any way?

Thankfully I'm using Total Commander and FastStone as a image organizer, neither of which have this bug in the sorting.

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

#318

Post by detaro »

Yizahi wrote: post #317
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…

How is that right, when file explorer picks an arbitrary character in the middle(!) of the filename and sorts by it? Say, I have a file987name.txt and list5.txt, so sorting by name ascending a file explorer would for whatever reason decide to sort by fifth character, so that list5 would lower than file987name, because 5 is lower than 9, via some twisted logic. How is that normal in any way? Thankfully I'm using Total…

... no file explorer behaves as you describe.

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

#319

Post by antonyh »

Thanks, now I cannot unsee this. Thunar has this broken sort order too, and I've no idea how to make it sort file names with hash values 'properly' - by which I mean the same as `ls` which broadly speaking on my system is 0 to 9 then a-z case insensitive.

Instead I have an order of starting character that goes 1,4,5,7,9,2,3,7,8,9,4,6,1,2,.. etc etc which is utterly useless as a sort. I've always thought the sort was weird but couldn't quite figure out why (I usually sort by date descending). Another non-productive thing to figure out and fix.

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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