Custom File Explorer sorting: can't get it to work with 2 target folders anymore

[daddydave]

What I’m trying to do

I am trying to get sortspec to work for SebastianMC’s excellent Custom File Explorer sorting plugin. It has been working flawlessly, but I changed things up in my vault lately and needed to update it. Now I can’t get it working again. I have tried both the short and long keywords (such as order-asc: vs < ).

Either sortspec below gives a parsing error:

---
sorting-spec: |
    target-folder: /
    order-asc: a-z
	
    target-folder: Reading
    order-desc: modified
---

---
sorting-spec: |
    target-folder: /
    < a-z
	
	target-folder: Reading
	> modified
---

Things I have tried

If I take out the last two non-blank lines, it parses with no problem. My sortspec seems very similar to Example 8 from the plugin documentation. I am using Obsidian v1.4.5 on Windows 11 and my workaround for using the nested properties that the plugin uses is to edit the sortspec.md file from a plain text editor.

I just have the one sortspec.md in my vault root.

[daddydave]

Now I have tried this in the sandbox folder as well (the second version, with and without an actual Reading folder).

[SebastianMC]

Hi @daddydave,

I was able to reproduce your problem locally and then examined the text and looks that for some reason the custom sort plugin doesn’t like the >TAB< character in the blank line. The line visually is blank, but thanks to copied & pasted the exact text, when examining in HEX editor, tab >TAB< character can be found in the line.

To make it work, simply remove the empty line or ensure that it is empty indeed or contains only spaces. You can do it in source mode (see below)

At the same time I created the ticket #96 in the plugin home site in github to address this exact problem.

Please see if you can comment directly in github (on the ticket), and if so, let’s move any further discussion there. Your report / request for help was waiting two weeks here in the forum, because I check github regularly and the forums occasionally only.

BTW the newly introduced Properties editor in Obsidian 1.14.x is a headache for many, unfortunately. I recommend to use the source view mode to edit the sortspec files directly in Obsidian. This would help to avoid accidental entering unexpected characters like >TAB<. Please look at the short movie here to see how to edit note metadata in source mode.

[daddydave]

Thanks a million! I can confirm this fixed the issue, thank you so much for this plugin! I just thought I would give it a shot here first before “bugging” you about it, in case there was some glaring syntax error I wasn’t seeing.

@SebastianMC

BTW the newly introduced Properties editor in Obsidian 1.14.x is a headache for many, unfortunately. I recommend to use the source view mode to edit the sortspec files directly in Obsidian. This would help to avoid accidental entering unexpected characters like >TAB<. Please look at the short movie here to see how to edit note metadata in source mode.

I can confirm your workaround using Shift-Enter works in Windows as well. I am also a fan of “Open in default app” Obsidian command as well for any file that is currently confusing Obsidian.