Totally agree: this is Obsidian’s biggest fail.
Why? Because our “second brains” don’t all work alike. They need to custom sort!
Isn’t this what Obsidian is all about?
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+1, Totally need this!!
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I’d like a custom programmatic search. For example, one heuristic that is not at all used is frequency of note access / note editing. If I could do a multi-sort (based on N criteria), that would suit my needs.
To be clear this is different from a fully manual sort that is mainly being discussed in this thread.
The thing to do is “simply” to allow plugins to add new types of sorting in the sort dropdown.
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Workarounds:
- Custom “Table of Contents” documents with links
- Prefix file/folder names with numbers
Findings:
- The “Starred” plugin doesn’t let you star folders and is a tedious way to accomplish sorting
Thoughts:
- Use the Graph View somehow(??)
Beyond:
- You may find something from the Obsidian plugins on GitHub @ obsidian-plugin · GitHub Topics · GitHub
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A custom search would be very nice, e.g. invers alphabetically sorting for listing the last daily note or last Zettelkasten note first.
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Pinning notes at the top of a folder (without resorting to weird naming conventions) would be nice, but at the bare minimum I would like to be able to use a different sort for each folder. For example, I would like to sort my Literature Notes by date, but have my list of pages-summarising-an-article be alphabetised so i can proceed author-year, or have my Templates folder run alphabetical.
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Count me in. Just one example: having folders 01 day, 02 week, 03 month and 04 year within daily notes folder is not attractive.
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Use case or problem
I would like to be able to sort the folders manually so that I can create my own order of folders instead of relying on the automated one.
Proposed solution
Let the user sort folders manually up and down in the tree
Related feature requests (optional)
Also it would be nice to be able to sort the files manually.
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To the Devs (who I HOPE have seen this thread), why have you NOT already implemented these feature requests or at least acknowledged the comments? IMHO, this is a huge fail for a wonderful app! (And something that should not be left to a Plugin!!!)
Why not just acknowledge ‘it’ in the Trello Roadmap? 
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Just adding my voice.
Reason: It means I can’t use Obsidian for writing, which I would like to do. I split my work into scenes (chapters come right at the very end), so there is no automatic sorting that is at all viable; it has to be manual.
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You have tried and rejected the Longform plugin?
I’ve not. Thanks for the heads up. It certainly looks interesting. I will investigate further. Thanks.
Oh yes, please… that would be awesome.
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It must be very hard to implement if they have not made this after a year of requests. Please consider this feature devs 
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I have to add a slightly different tweak on the same idea. I do utilize some folders. Within the folder structure, I would like the .md files to always appear at the top in whatever sort of order is picked (even if it is manual). I also have “unsupported” and supported attachments that I keep within the same folders, and I would want them to appear in the same folder below the current item. This way my stuff stays together, but I have notes at the top with support material in context below.
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Should we wait for this feature? It would be very helpful!
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Just began using this software – it’s bizarre that this feature is not present at all. Even if it were under an experimental / “use at your own risk” section, just give users the option please. All you need to do is store indicies for each item internally and update them if the user drags them.
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I want to customize the arrangement of my documents,
Don’t like to arrange documents by time or name
I like the freedom to arrange my documents.
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I never really heavily used custom sorting in other apps that provided it, but within Obsidian I would absolutely love this feature! I am not desperate but somewhere down the line, it would definitely be a big help to have this.
Also, I am not sure if this should be considered a separate request, but if this feature were implemented, it would be really nice to have custom sort as one of the sorting choices, so as to allow for switching between options. Perhaps the saved sort orders could be recognized and stored within saved workspaces. There is also the route of having specific folders sorted uniquely, but I will hold off on requesting that for now.
PS: I am beginning here but understand and am happy to craft a separate request in the near future. And I will keep it to a single request. I mainly wanted to throw this into the mix here since the ideas could technically be under the umbrella of custom sort.
Thanks for understanding.
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+1
It would improve a lot the writing experience. Even better if the hierarchy generated when rendered one document…
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