Bug 425457

(sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but it's minor things like these that often help a lot with usability. Every other "list-like thing" that I remember having used in the past few days sorts the most recent items to the top first). Thanks for your great work!

No you're right, I totally agree.

I also think this is a good idea, but, how in your opinion it should be implemented?
The only option I see is to automatically change "oldest first" to "newest first" when a user chooses to sort by some column that involves date/time.
But wouldn't such behavior be irritating?
I think that it will (at least) require a setting, something like 'Automatically change the sort order to newest first for any time/date columns'..

(In reply to Nazar Kalinowski from comment #3)
> I also think this is a good idea, but, how in your opinion it should be
> implemented?
> The only option I see is to automatically change "oldest first" to "newest
> first" when a user chooses to sort by some column that involves date/time.
> But wouldn't such behavior be irritating?
Yeah that was also my first thought, as well as my first concern. :)

> I think that it will (at least) require a setting, something like
> 'Automatically change the sort order to newest first for any time/date
> columns'..
I dunno, that seems like over-configuration. How about this:

1. Give every sort criterion a default ordering ("newest first", "a-z", etc)
2. Remember the user's preference if they change to the opposite ordering

This way the first time the user switches to "Date modified" it would automatically order "newest first", but if they changed to "oldest first", and then switched to "name", the next time they went back to "Date modified", it would remember that the last used order was "oldest first" and use that.

Does that make any sense?

This may be slightly off topic, but something has bothered me about sorting in Dolphin, and I didn't realize what it was until reading this bug report.

The "direction arrow" shown in the columns is the opposite of what I would expect, and what I've become used to from most other "click to sort a column" experiences.

For example, open up KSysGuard, and on the "Process table" tab, click the "CPU %" column to sort it.  (This is a pretty common scenario: "Show me the top resource-consuming processes").

And notice: after one click, it auto-sorts from highest cpu % to lowest cpu %, and the direction of the arrow is pointing "down" (or maybe: big wide part at the top, small pointy part at the bottom). Conceptually this makes sense to me: big part of the arrow is at the top, and small is at the bottom, so it is "big to small" or "high to low cpu %".

But now do the same for a column in Dolphin, and it is reversed. When the "Size" column has the arrow "big at top, small at bottom", the big files are at the bottom of the list and the small files are at the top.

I'm sure the is a highly personal opinion, but anecdotally I swear the pattern in KSysGuard is far more common and natural, and if Dolphin conforms to it maybe it would resolve this bug as well.

side note, this is my first comment ever, and if my suggestion makes sense I wouldn't mind implementing this as my first contribution :)

I agree. It's actually set by Qt; I believe ksysguard overrides it (IIRC). It would be better to fix in Qt if possible. See https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-9299

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4)

> Does that make any sense?

Yep, it definitely does, sounds way better now!

Please don't mix issues in a single ticket. For the arrows, please see bug 356305.

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4)

> I dunno, that seems like over-configuration. How about this:
> 
> 1. Give every sort criterion a default ordering ("newest first", "a-z", etc)
> 2. Remember the user's preference if they change to the opposite ordering

> Does that make any sense?

This is how I think it should work too. I often use the large icon view and every time want to sort by modified I have to click a second time in the context menu to select "Newest First". It would also make sense to move  "Newest First"  above "Oldest First" in the context menu since it would be the new default.