Sort by type, then sort by size instead of name

[aminomancer]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the way it works when you sort the list by "Type" is it first sorts all the files/folders by type and arranges the types in alphabetical order. And within a given type it arranges the files by the name of the file. Which is very useful and the way it normally works. But I would really like if there was a second "Type" sorting method that worked exactly the same way, but within a given type it arranged the files from largest to smallest instead of by the name of the file.

If you have a folder with a ton of subfolders and you arrange it by type the normal way, all the folders will be at the top, and they'll be arranged by name. With the system I'm thinking of, the folders would still be grouped at the top but the biggest folders would come before the smallest folders, and so on for every file type.

I always notice this would be really helpful when I'm trying to manually hunt for files on old drives. If you have a folder with a huge amount of loose files, the "Size" sorting method becomes really unwieldy since all different file types are mixed together. You don't really have a meaningful frame of reference for the size of the files, since file size is so often correlated with filetype. Like a "big" mp4 is gonna be a lot larger than a "big" jpg. In those circumstances I kept finding myself right clicking the columns and trying to figure out a way to sort the files by both size AND type. And usually when I'm looking for an old file but I can't remember its name, I don't remember how big it was in terms of bytes, I just remember its file type and its relative size.

So it would often help if I had a way to group all the mp4s and then arrange them by size, so I could immediately look towards the top when I know it was large "for an mp4," or at the bottom when I know it was small. Maybe it's just me since my work usually revolves around media files, where you'd remember a particularly long or high-quality render as a "big" video file. Still, it doesn't seem all that different from the existing "Type" sorting, just switch the name sorting for size sorting, so maybe it's not difficult to implement? Sorry if I'm not being clear, having a hard time phrasing this concisely. Basically, 1) group the files by type, but 2) sort within the groups by size instead of by name.

[jupe]

Secondary sorting should do what you require, look it up in the help file for more info.

https://www.xyplorer.com/release_7.00.php#sort2