File Sort Order

[JDługosz]

I was grumbling about the directory listing and "date string" order, which I've worked around in other folders before by using numbers or other formats, but that has caused its own problems in forgetting later whether the convention refers to a day or month number. Then it occurred to me that XYplorer really should be able to handle this for me. Who cares about other programs?

Here is an example: Names of

• 2013-Jan-3
  2013-Feb-17
  2014-Mar-18

Using the full big-endian convention (different than American common convention) gives a alphabetical ordering if numbers are used and zero-filled. But using all numbers is ambiguous, and my preferred format is to spell the month (and use 4 digit year) so it is explicit. I also find it nicely readable.

Sorting the Name column will normally keep the years together and the days within each month together, but will put the months in the wrong order since they are inconveniently named for the information age. The string “Feb”<“Jan” for example.

Now there is precedent since various file shells have handled numeric interpretation as an extension to alphabetical order, going back decades. That is:

Code: Select all

1, 11, 12, 13, 2, 3 …

is fixed to implicitly zero-fill the deduced numeric field within the name.

It would be simple to sort based on a parsed date/time.
It would be more flexible to allow user-defined sorting as a transformation that can be supplied somehow. Since there are comments and note fields, a sort-order can be stored as such a field and used when "Name" is shown as the sort column. I see databases have a field for AuthorSort="Smith, Jim" to supplement Author="Jim Smith", for example.