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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”

#321

Post by antonyh »

userbinator wrote: post #166

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 use…

It looks like GTK & KDE both suffer from this - I get this behaviour in Thunar and in Dolphin. This is the kind of thing that makes me lose sleep. It's the same on MacOS too, at least in the latest version.

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

#322

Post by Yizahi »

detaro wrote: post #318
Yizahi wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was an analogy, to illustrate how the "intelligent guessing" of sorting looks weird as soon as any other character is ignored.

PS: apparently FastStone also sorts "intelligently" :( , I didn't test it correctly the first time. Only Total Commander does sorting as expected.

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

#323

Post by bmn__ »

Spivak wrote: post #193
lukan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The author's situation is extremely rare" People sorting their files for alphabetical order is extremely rare? And right now I fail to see even one 'case where someone wants "10" to be before "9"'

People sorting their files in alphabetical order but who want numerical values in their files to be sorted digit by digit instead of as numbers is the rare case. I might go further in my ideal sorting algo which would be normalize capitalization and ignore all non-alphanumeric characters and treat them all as separators.

What you vaguely outline has already been standardised in UTS #10. The algorithm is both based on prevailing user expectations and also has shaped them since the wide-spread adoption of implementations.

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

#324

Post by rickdeckard »

Moru wrote: post #271
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, "Treat any sequence of digits as a number for the purpose of sorting" is consistent. 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? > Let's say I have a directory of 32 numbered files. Assuming any of the filesystems I am aware…

Sorting dates: This is why there is an international standard of having YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in the order we have it. We got to learn this in school in the 80-ies because sorting paper documents would be more logical and easier to find stuff. So way before most people got computerized. It just happens to be the most logical way to sort for computers too, as long as humans are involved in the usage of the data.

> Sorting dates: This is why there is an international standard of having YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in the order we have it.

That would be great, but this ISO is just one of the standards, and there are still regional standards as well.

And that's still ignoring the end-user. In Europe for example, humans might create filenames with date in format dd.mm, e.g. "Report 25.01.xls"

A system attempting to sort this intelligently would likely assume this is a decimal number, as it has zero context for it.

It's just slightly worse than the lack of consistent UTC-usage of systems, with the mixed attempts to correct data to local timezone (or not) depending on application...

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

#325

Post by bmn__ »

dvdkon wrote: post #99
_9ptr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And where do you sort the letter ä? (After a is correct in German, but I think Swedish does it differently.)

This feels like the right moment to mention "ch", which is considered a letter in orthodox Czech, sorted between "h" and "i". The problem is, you can't reliably distinguish between "ch"-the-letter and "ch" as just "c" and "h" combined, which are present in loan words but also some original Czech compound words. So if you're doing it "properly", sorting strings in Czech involves understanding the etymology of every wo…

What a headache! I'm glad that the relevant standard ČSN 97 6030 does not demand analysis of compounds or knowledge of etymology.

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

#326

Post by bmn__ »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #240
AlienRobot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Understanding the target audience for your product results in very different design decisions This is an excuse. Just add an option to sort both ways. It isn't hard. There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features. Even if you had the features under an "advanced mode" UI that's still a better software than not having the feature in first place. Have people forgotten the 80…

> There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features. I'm currently involved in UI design and, to my frustration, adding more options or features seems to send a vocal minority of the user base into a foaming-at-the-mouth violent rage. It's like any change resets the entire contents of their brain, and it's our fault we're making things so confusing for everyone... And let's n…

It is best to not engage with these demons.

KDE welcomes configurable complexity, Gnome deemphasises it. I am glad that broad user choice exists.

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

#327

Post by bmn__ »

lisper wrote: post #189
hchdifnfbgbf wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Real alphabetical ordering” is incredibly nonspecific. It’s underspecified even for ASCII-US, but essentially meaningless for those of us in 2025 who need to handle Unicode. How do capital letters sort relative to lowercase letters? How do letters sort relative to digits? How do you consider code points that can correspond to different letters in different lettering systems with different ordering? How do you handle…

The issue at hand is how numbers are sorted. That has nothing to do with unicode.

You're wrong about that. See UTS #10 § 1.4.

(I did not downvote you.)

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

#328

Post by crazygringo »

kalleboo wrote: post #263
crazygringo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prefer looking at photos in that weirdly particular shuffled order that isn't the order they were taken in?

If I want to sort by date, I sort by the "Date" column, not the file name

I hope you don't ever copy files.

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

#329

Post by crazygringo »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #246
crazygringo wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever copied a file?

Yes, have you never edited the metadata? Also most filesystems these days preserve it when copied, e.g. my camera's EXFAT filesystem on an SD card gets the creation date preserved when I copy it to my PC or NAS, or between NAS & laptop later.

> Yes, have you never edited the metadata?

I don't even know what that means.

And just because some OS's copy the creation date doesn't mean all of them do. Specifically, the most popular desktop OS -- Windows -- doesn't.

(And it has nothing to do with your filesystem. It's your OS.)

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