So, this may be a really strange thing to want to do, but I’ve started to prefix my directories with 2 digit hexadecimal numbers (0a for instance) in order to make directory navigation faster when not in a GUI. Does anyone know of a way to force any of the GUI file managers to list directories in such a way that it respects the logical ordering of hex values (09 should come before 0a, not after.)
An example of directory names in my system’s /Documents/ directory :
01 Assigned Work/
02 Completed Work
03 web dev class/
04 Spring 2025/
05 Fall 2024/
06 Summer 2024/
07 Spring 2024/
08 Fall 2023/
09 springClass2023
0a previousSemesters/
0b Life
0c Cybersecurity
The nature of my question is trying to understand why a GUI application like Krusader correctly orders these directories based on what I’m wanting to do whereas Thunar does not. Thunar seems to Name sort in this order instead:
0a
0b
0c
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
So I’d like to figure out how to force Thunar to display things the “right” way.
I’d be very surprised if it expected hexadecimal numbers.
More likely, strings are just ordered in lexicographic order based on the ASCII table (or some extension, like Unicode), and since numbers precede all letters, it works out… so long as you don’t mix upper and lowercase. In that case 0B < 0a. Dolphin certainly seems to work that way.
I’d be extremely surprised if any of those softwares exposed an option for the user to change the character table used in sorting. You’ll need to ask the devs nicely or do it yourself.
As you are using numbers, you may need to place the number beside the special character instead like so:
$00_myFavouriteFolder
Notice, however, that Nemo doesn’t care about the special character, which is not what is supposed to happen, I think.
Note: Different special characters do different things, and in different apps for some reason. This was Nemo. For whatever reason, using the pound symbol at the beginning makes the folder get listed as the last unhidden folder.
When I use an app like XnViewMP, pound symbols come second to dollar signs. But generally, dollar signs are the highest for all file/media managers I’ve used over the years.
Here is the same home directory, but in Dolphin. This is also, I think, the incorrect way.
And finally, in Krusader which I think does it the correct way.
I say correct or incorrect here based on a forum post I read on Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange years ago. Probably won’t be able to find it, but that is where I learned that special characters allow you to bypass basic alphanumeric sorting.
Right, that’s what I’m finding odd, because there seems to be an internal logic for each application’s dev team relative to how they handle sorting. I had assumed (wrongly apparently) that using Krusader wouldn’t be different in terms of the Sort Algorithm that is being used for the displayed name sort result. I was genuinely surprised to find that Krusader handles the Hexvalue display the way that I’m wanting. So it seems my choices are to use GUI applications that have the sort table already in place for my preferred organization method, or to modify my software myself, which would be more time consuming than hard I think since it’d just be learning how to shift the sort priorities for a given software and then implementing that for whichever application I cut open to play with…
