I downloaded Obsidian, following the recommendation of many people online, and wound up on this forum page within 15 minutes of first using the application.
How can such a basic and near-universally implemented feature be absent from what is supposedly the best text-based project management software available? As is, this is practically a non-starter. When I plan on creating tens of folders with more folders within with hundreds of notes per project, I cannot accept automatic sorting, or having to manually and painstakingly number each note within folder within folder within folder, etc. This is a basic feature provided by nearly every alternative application and should have been implemented when this issue was first raised over three years ago.
Seriously, how could this be so challenging to realize that itâs been basically ignored for so long? If it will never be implemented someone from Obsidian should say, so that I and others can find alternative mediums for our projects.
This is so much extra work. To achieve the desired functionality one must:
Create a new âbookmark groupâ in the bookmarks tab to match the folder you wish to recreate from files.
Create the note in files.
Bookmark the note, choosing the matching âbookmark group.â
Go to the bookmarks tab and arrange the newly bookmarked files into the order you desire.
Repeat for every newly created note or folder.
The worst part is that this proves the capability to add this feature exists. Why not implement it in the way everyone in this thread is asking for, instead of creating an entire extra system of organization that adds the same functionality in a much more laborious and tedious way?
The feature is not nearly the same as the bookmarks. Although you can order the bookmarks, they do not expand as the folders in the file tree do. Being able to order files and folders in custom order would be simply extremely powerful in the file tree.
The bookmarks also keep going back to the file tree view when they are selected so really they add a ton of more clicks to keep going back and forth which is very attention consuming.
I really agree this would be such an awesome functionality to have in the file tree directly.
Bartender never worked for me sadly, and this is a critical functionality for me. Iâm a writer and I shuffle my chapters/scenes all the time, I canât even express how critical this is for me and for many writers, which is evident by the Scrivener popularity.
Is the Obsidian team ever going to give a definitive statement on this topic? Continuing to ignore the substantive comments while replying to the fluff seems intentionally avoidant. Could you please just answer the following questions:
If custom sort functionality is impossible to implement in files, why?
If custom sort is possible, which seems to be the case considering itâs already implemented elsewhere (bookmark feature), what is preventing that functionality from being added to files?
If this issue will never be meaningfully addressed by the team, why continue to leave this thread up and allow people to share their frustration only for their concerns be completely ignored?
No, the same way there is no definitive statement for the other 4000+ feature requests. What is committed to happen is in the roadmap.
Custom sort is not impossible, however it is complex to implement, especially when new files can be added/removed arbitrarily and outside Obsidian, and computationally expensive. I believe neither macosâ finder nor windowsâ file explorer has this feature.
Really disappointed this doesnât exist, it prevents the software from being used in a serious manner. Itâs a basic and necessary feature and all the proposed solutions in here are super hacky.
Unable to customize sorting is the biggest challenge I encountered after transferring from other note taking software to OBSIDIAN, which is clearly the most basic feature. I tried to solve it with a plugin, but still couldnât achieve satisfactory results. Unbelievable, this issue has been raised since 2020, and the Obstidian team has still not solved it. You cannot choose to evade this issue just because this feature is difficult to implement. You should conquer it, no matter what method you use, including referencing other software, discussing with users, and offering heavy rewards.
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