Sorting of Non-Folder Items

[moku]

Perhaps there is a way to do this, but I cannot figure it out.

I'd like all my non-folder items to sort before my folders.

This is my ideal:

My Data
Appointments
Contacts
Imported Items
Notes
Projects
Recycle Bin
Tasks
Templates
All Areas
California
New York
Washington

However, when I try to get something like this setup using "Sort Siblings", I get everything all jumbled up (i.e. inclusive alpha sort of all items regardless of type).

The best I have managed to do is this:

My Data
_Appointments
_Contacts
_Imported Items
_Notes
_Projects
_Tasks
_Templates
All Areas
California
New York
Recycle Bin
Washington

NOTE that the Recycle Bin is sorted in my folders and apparently cannot be renamed or moved.

Does anyone know how to move/rename the Recycle Bin? Or to make all non-folder items sort out ahead of folders?

Is there a "lock item" sort of command to lock it in a particular sort position?

And, in general, why do "special items" sort alphabetically anyway? It does not seem all very intuitive to have things like "Projects" and "Notes" to be sorted in between generic folders.

Any thoughts???

[kinook]

When sorting siblings in the tree, UR performs an alphabetical sort of all items at the same level.

The only predefined items that are "special" are Recycle Bin, Templates, and Imported Items (any of the others can be moved, deleted or renamed as desired). You can also rename Recycle Bin, Imported Items, and Templates if it would help, and you can move them elsewhere via Tree | Link/Move on the menu.

You can manually order siblings in a different order via Tree | Move Up/Down (and new siblings will be added at the end). Or, you could create additional children as a child of a top-level node, instead of as immediate children of My Data.

[moku]

Originally posted by kinook
When sorting siblings in the tree, UR performs an alphabetical sort of all items at the same level.

The only predefined items that are "special" are Recycle Bin, Templates, and Imported Items (any of the others can be moved, deleted or renamed as desired). You can also rename Recycle Bin, Imported Items, and Templates if it would help, and you can move them elsewhere via Tree | Link/Move on the menu.

You can manually order siblings in a different order via Tree | Move Up/Down (and new siblings will be added at the end). Or, you could create additional children as a child of a top-level node, instead of as immediate children of My Data.

In my experiments, there is no obvious way to rename the Recycle Bin (I think there was a bug 'fixed' that now disallows renaming of the Recycle Bin).

However, I did find a way to get all the built-in items both at the top of the tree and out of way.

I created a folder called _Builtins and then moved all the built-in items into it. I was able to use Link/Move to successfully get everything into this folder, including the Recycle Bin, Templates, and Imported Items. I kept the underscore names for everything except the Recycle Bin, so I have:

[built-ins folder]
.
.
_built-in items
.
.
Recycle Bin

This way the Recycle Bin is always at the bottom of the list, not 'hiding' in the other items.

Now I have a lot more vertical space in my data explorer simply by closing this one folder. And if I want, I could selectively move the more useful (to me) built-in items out with underscore prefixed names and still keep them at the top of the tree.

Thanks for the help. Link/Move is what I needed but the normal move item UI appears grayed out for some items that can be moved via the Link/Move dialog.

What would be nice is a way to force the Recycle Bin to be the last item in the overall tree. There is no tricky way of doing this as far as I know. Perhaps one could make a folder called 'zzzzzz' and then put the Recycle Bin inside of it... or prefix all normal folder names with underscore and then like my existing solution, the Recylce Bin would be sorted out to the bottom of the tree...

[quant]

to rename Recycle Bin, just go to item attributes and change title name. I actually use 'z' prefix that you mention

[moku]

Originally posted by quant
to rename Recycle Bin, just go to item attributes and change title name. I actually use 'z' prefix that you mention

Thanks for the help.. I did manage to rename the recycle bin this way.

What 'ASCII'-based sorting needs is some nice symbol that is not 'z' and still sorts after 'z' ... ;-)

There would be a way of doing this with Unicode, but it appears that the Windows method of using Alt+NumPad to input character codes is not supported for folder names.

[quant]

Originally posted by moku
What 'ASCII'-based sorting needs is some nice symbol that is not 'z' and still sorts after 'z' ... ;-)

Kinook, is there such symbol/character?

[kinook]

What would be a 'nice' symbol to use? If you find one you like, enter it into UR's rich text editor by typing its hex value and pressing Alt+X (or you could use Word's Insert | Symbol feature). To use in a UR item title, select and copy it to the clipboard, then edit the title and paste.

Another way, while editing the title, is to hold down Alt, type the character code on the numeric keypad, then release Alt.

[quant]

Originally posted by kinook
What would be a 'nice' symbol to use?

Any that when used for item title and sorting alphabetically, would place this item after any other item with title starting with letter a-Z.

Is there such symbol?

PS:
I use the standard "Character Map" provided by Windows ...

[ashwken]

Originally posted by quant
Any that when used for item title and sorting alphabetically, would place this item after any other item with title starting with letter a-Z.

I wonder if the sorting is hard-coded into the Data Explorer module, everything after ALT-0122 (z) sorts before "z" - any non-alpha character sorts before alpha characters (A-Z, a-z), regadless of ASCII value.

[kinook]

Sorting is implemented by Windows (see the lstrcmpi and CompareString APIs for details). I believe it sorts most punctuation characters before letters, but many characters of other languages sort after z. There are quite a few Unicode characters to choose from -- you'd just have to experiment to find one that is "nice" and sorts as desired.

[quant]

If someone's interested, this is the best (neutral, small) I found ι

Any Greek letter will do, for example π, ω ...

[ashwken]

Originally posted by quant
Any Greek letter will do, for example π, ω ...

That would be ALT-224 thru ALT-238 - hold down ALT and type the number on the Numeric Keypad - or are there more Greek letters available from CHARMAP.