5 ms·

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.
              • lisper 1y ago
                You are starting to sound like a troll. Yes, unicode has many representations of digits. That has nothing to do with the question of whether 2.jpg should come before or after 10.jpg.
                • hchdifnfbgbf 1y ago
                  You think user deserve to have control, but you think that control only needs to extend to the treatment of those ten characters, nothing else? I guess your position is coherent, but it’s very silly.