Hello,
I've noticed when Midnight Commander sorts filenames alphabetically, it
treats numbers specially as to sort filenames "a1", "a3" and "a20" in this
order, contrary to the expected "a1", "a20", "a3" order provided by most if
not everything else (examples I had readily available: ls, sort, Konqueror
file manager, KDE file chooser, Opera's file chooser, Python's
sorted(os.listdir('.'))). As a reference, FAR Manager sorts like everything
else too. It's just Midnight Commander the one sorting weirdly. (I'm using
the "C" collation locale, although as far as I understand this is not
dictated by locales.)
While this may look nice on the basis that the number 3 comes before the
number 20 and so on (when treated as such!), this is extremely irritating
because almost everything else will sort files correctly and contradict
Midnight Commander's file sorting. It's even dangerous, as it may lead to
user confusion and mistakes that could derive in data loss. Allow me to
explain my particular case as an example: I use Midnight Commander as my
central file management tool. However, in order to view image files, I've
associated my own image viewer with the F3 (view) action for image files.
This image viewer allows me to walk forwards and backwards within the
directory starting from the file I used to open it, so for example I'm in a
directory with files "a1.png", "a3.png" and "a20.png" as seen in Midnight
Commander. I hit F3 on "a1.png", and then go forwards to the next file
expecting to view what was next in Midnight Commander - "a3.png"; however
the image viewer (and any other application I have) will jump to "a20.png"
if they're alphabetically sorting files. I may then see something I don't
like, and decide to delete the next file to the one I started browsing, so
when I'm back to Midnight Commander I go and delete the wrong file
("a3.png").
Could you implement an option to disable this kind of "user-friendly"
natural sort algorithm that could easily backfire on users and end up being
unfriendly?
Thanks
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