GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337700
Column heading arrows seem to be the wrong way
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:20:44 UTC
I don't understand what the direction of the arrows in the column headers is meant to represent. For the 'size' column, for example, it seems logical for it to mean this: ^ -- pointy bit means 'small things this end' -- big bit means 'big things this end' (that's not what it does though) For names, it appears to indicate the flow of alphabetical order: ^ -- alphabetical order is going up. List reads from Z-A going down. That seems reasonable, though it could be argued that 'big names' should mean the end of the alphabet. For dates, I'm not sure what it means. 'big dates' would logically be the most recent ones since the numbers are bigger. (see also Bug 337699).
Personally, I agree with you. It seems nautilus isn't the only one with this problem, it seems to be present in any gtk app that has column sorting...
Nautilus and GTK+ both follow Gnome Human Interface Guidelines to determine which way the arrow indicates. Thus, the way they do it is correct according to Gnome HIG (see: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/controls-lists.html#controls-lists-sortable). You may disagree with Gnome HIG, but many people have approved its design so I doubt this will ever change. Recommend this bug be closed.
There are the occasional things in the HIG that are out of date or weird :) But Nautilus and GTK should certainly follow it, so it's an issue with the HIG not Nautilus. We can either move this bug to the HIG, or NOTABUG it and I can file it again for the HIG with a clearer subject and description.
-> HIG Yes, let's move this to the HIG component to hear some feedback from designers.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 305277 ***