File Explorer Custom Sort

+1 for this

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+1

The file tree is still vital. This would enhance it greatly.

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This is tangentially-related, but could be useful to someone out there — if you want to add ‘separators’ to your list of files or folders in the sidebar, I like to use blank files or folders with names including superscript characters and hyphens. Let me explain with an example — say I want to separate folders starting with T and V, I can put a blank folder between them and name it ᔘ-----------ᔘ. Other subscript and superscript characters work too. I know it’s a bit of a hacky solution, but it could be of some help while a custom-sort feature is deliberated.

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+1 I need this too

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Yeah would be nice. Lots of notes means lots of organisation is needed.

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This is the biggest feature that I’m missing from obsidian.

I agree that there could be a .json file in .obsidian folder to store all this information, or possibly frontmatter could have a “weight” property which allows you to manually set the ordering of the post. That’s how Hugo does it. It’d allow people to stick to markdown, but I think it would be much less convenient.

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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:

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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? :pray:

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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 :clap:

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