GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 662315
Arraging Items by 'Type', arranges them recursively by 'alphabetical' order of their extensions, not by grouping them first
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:17:30 UTC
Nautilus arranges items by 'Type' by sorting them according to alphabetical order of their extensions. In fact, this is not arranging by type at all, because one type can have multiple extensions, for example, Image files can have extensions like, '.png', '.gif' and '.jpg', if these files existed in one directory with some type of files like '.mp3', then they would be arranged by Type as the following: '.gif', '.jpg', '.mp3' then 'png', thus image files will be split by '.mp3' multimedia files. Suggested fix: Nautilus should arrange files by type according to extension groups first, then by alphabetical order. Though it can be thought of as a non-bug, it causes a user to find files in unexpected place on 'by-type' file sorting because Images are generally of one type, Audio files too, hence comes the 'type group' sorting instead of normal extension alphabetical sorting, that's what arranging by type was originally made for, a normal user won't really care about extension's spelling but rather will easily recognize the file category. This requests to change the old arrange 'by type' method to 'by category' method.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.