GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 338154
Items with a prepended exclamation mark not sorted first.
Last modified: 2012-08-09 14:49:21 UTC
If you create a folder or file with an exclamation mark prepending the name - for example "!My Music" - it is not sorted before the other items in either list or icon view when sorted by name (I haven't tried other sort methods.) I'm guessing this behavior is intentional, but I can't seem to figure out why. It's also worth mentioning that typeahead find does not work with these items. Typing "My Music" should select the "!My Music" folder if the exclamation mark is ignored intentionally, but it does not. Maybe that should be filed as a seperate bug? I suggest: 1. Sort items with exclamation marks before others. 2. Ignore prepending exclamation marks in typeahead find.
I was not sure if I should file this under Navigation or Keyboardability or General. It seems it ended up in Keyboardability. Feel free to reassign component. I chose to mark this Severity: Major because it makes the exclamation mark totally useless as a "move to the top" method and typeahead find is broken.
Aren't things just being sorted using the locale's usual sort order? Is using "!" for this purpose common enough that we should be special casing it for typeahead? (Personally, I use underscore; other people may use other things.) Seems to me we should have a better way of treating files/folders as "important" (using emblems, maybe?), rather than relying on tricks like this.
(In reply to comment #2) > Aren't things just being sorted using the locale's usual sort order? I don't know. Do you know of any documents that define the sort order for each locale? I guess they would say if the locale usually ignores special characters when sorting. For the record, my locale is nb-NO. > Is using "!" for this purpose common enough that we should be special casing it > for typeahead? I think it is, but allow me to reiterate my point: As long as the exclamation mark is ignored when sorting, it should also be ignored when typeaheadfinding.
As I understand it, the sort order is defined by a locale definition source file, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/IBM/usr/share/man/info/en_US/a_doc_lib/files/aixfiles/LC_COLLATE.htm for more info. I don't know what package would provide that file for your locale (presumably a source package, as it's subsequently compiled)-- probably varies by distro. WRT to typeahead, I guess the question we need to consider is whether the exclamation mark is really being "ignored", or just not being sorted the way you'd expect. If I had a legitimate, non-sort-related reason for having some filenames start with an exclamation mark, I'd probably be somewhat annoyed if I couldn't locate them with typeahead. Perhaps a better solution would be for typeahead to match within filenames, rather than just at the beginning? (Perhaps filenames that matched at the beginning could still take priority.) I think there's another bug open somewhere suggesting something along those lines, but I don't have it to hand.
Bug reorganisation.
This bug was reported against a version which is not supported any more. Developers are no longer working on this version so there will not be any bug fixes for it. Can you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a recent version of GNOME and update this report by adding a comment and adjusting the 'Version' field? Again thank you for reporting this and sorry that it could not be fixed for the version you originally used here. Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE after 6 weeks.
Mostly the same bug as 355152, closing as a duplicate of that. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 355152 ***