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I almost always want the version-sorting that's being presented in this article, rather than an "alphabetical" sort. But on the other hand, it absolutely seems

I almost always want the version-sorting that's being presented in this article, rather than an "alphabetical" sort. But on the other hand, it absolutely seems like a valid bug that this is presented as an "alphabetical" sort, rather than something like "alphabetic/numeric" or similar. In other words, a problem of labeling rather than one of sorting.

lisper 1y ago
Yeah, exactly. The behavior described is actually very useful. The problem is imposing it on the user with no warning or option to turn it off.
- sebtron 1y ago
  Author here - I Agree both with you and with the parent's comment. Having two options in the "sort by menu" - like "Name (natural)" and "Name (strict)" or something - would have solved everything.
- parineum 1y ago
  > The problem is imposing it on the user with no warning or option to turn it off. You can say that about every single design decision made about every product. The gripe about this particular feature seems misplaced because almost all users will want the sort that's offered and the actual alphabetical sort is likely the desire of a more advanced user who, in fact, is offered a choice through registry editing and/or using a more advanced cli option for the occasion they might need an alternative sort. This is a sensible default.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > You can say that about every single design decision made about every product. No, that's not true. Many aspects of my computer's UI are user-configurable.
    - mtoner23 1y ago
      Yes but not every single one of them
      - lisper 1y ago
        Obviously. All I'm saying is that this particular decision ought not to have been taken from the user. Real alphabetical order is not an unreasonable thing to want.
        hchdifnfbgbf 1y ago
        “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 diacritics? Do you want the behaviour to be stable through Unicode normalization? Should it differ based on the character encoding? Should different representations of the same character, such as blackboard lettering or circled numbers, be sorted with other representations of the same character or grouped separately? You can come up answers for these questions, but there’s no unambiguously correct option. The least subjective option is sorting based on encoded byte representation (if that is even specified), but that is not “alphabetical” and would not be intuitive to most users.
        lisper 1y ago
        The issue at hand is how numbers are sorted. That has nothing to do with unicode.
        hchdifnfbgbf 1y ago
        Unicode has many different representations of digits, and I would dispute using the term “alphabetical” to refer to digit ordering in any case.
plorkyeran 1y ago
It’s not being presented as an alphabetical sort, though. The author assumed that sorting by name meant an alphabetical sort, but that’s not how it’s labeled.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  In fairness, sorting by name has, for many years, been an alphabetic sort. Doing a mixed alpha/numeric sort is a relatively new thing.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - pseudalopex 1y ago
    Natural sorting is relatively new in KDE. But in Windows since 2001.
xerox13ster 1y ago
The term for the sort in the article is called lexical, but the problem is the people are stupid. The average user does not know the difference between lexical and alphabetic sort
bee_rider 1y ago
Notably, some versions of “sort” on Linux have version sort nowadays. sort -V I actually don’t know exactly how it works internally and it is a little bit magical, but I use it all the time when looking through my files because it just sorta works in most cases. Of course a nice thing about it is easy to turn on or off.

lisper 1y ago

Yeah, exactly. The behavior described is actually very useful. The problem is imposing it on the user with no warning or option to turn it off.

sebtron 1y ago
Author here - I Agree both with you and with the parent's comment. Having two options in the "sort by menu" - like "Name (natural)" and "Name (strict)" or something - would have solved everything.
parineum 1y ago
> The problem is imposing it on the user with no warning or option to turn it off. You can say that about every single design decision made about every product. The gripe about this particular feature seems misplaced because almost all users will want the sort that's offered and the actual alphabetical sort is likely the desire of a more advanced user who, in fact, is offered a choice through registry editing and/or using a more advanced cli option for the occasion they might need an alternative sort. This is a sensible default.
- lisper 1y ago
  > You can say that about every single design decision made about every product. No, that's not true. Many aspects of my computer's UI are user-configurable.
  - mtoner23 1y ago
    Yes but not every single one of them
    - lisper 1y ago
      Obviously. All I'm saying is that this particular decision ought not to have been taken from the user. Real alphabetical order is not an unreasonable thing to want.
      - hchdifnfbgbf 1y ago
        “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 diacritics? Do you want the behaviour to be stable through Unicode normalization? Should it differ based on the character encoding? Should different representations of the same character, such as blackboard lettering or circled numbers, be sorted with other representations of the same character or grouped separately? You can come up answers for these questions, but there’s no unambiguously correct option. The least subjective option is sorting based on encoded byte representation (if that is even specified), but that is not “alphabetical” and would not be intuitive to most users.
        lisper 1y ago
        The issue at hand is how numbers are sorted. That has nothing to do with unicode.
        hchdifnfbgbf 1y ago
        Unicode has many different representations of digits, and I would dispute using the term “alphabetical” to refer to digit ordering in any case.

plorkyeran 1y ago

It’s not being presented as an alphabetical sort, though. The author assumed that sorting by name meant an alphabetical sort, but that’s not how it’s labeled.

lsaferite 1y ago
In fairness, sorting by name has, for many years, been an alphabetic sort. Doing a mixed alpha/numeric sort is a relatively new thing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  Natural sorting is relatively new in KDE. But in Windows since 2001.

xerox13ster 1y ago

The term for the sort in the article is called lexical, but the problem is the people are stupid. The average user does not know the difference between lexical and alphabetic sort

bee_rider 1y ago

Notably, some versions of “sort” on Linux have version sort nowadays. sort -V I actually don’t know exactly how it works internally and it is a little bit magical, but I use it all the time when looking through my files because it just sorta works in most cases. Of course a nice thing about it is easy to turn on or off.