Dolphin: Expandable folders always sorted by name?

Help
1

In Dolphin, Details view with “Folders Expandable” and “Folders first”, is it possible to sort files by date (or anything else), but keep the Folders at the top sorted by name?

2

This is not possible.

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3

Thanks. I will use the Folders panel instead

4

Yes - you can use the tree view with “Folders First” and sort by date. When you have some folders open, the folders will be at the top, each ordered by the date (or whatever other column you want) and under each folder there will be an inset with the files in that folders - ordered by date.

It should look like this:

- Folder 1
  +- File 1.1
   - File 1.2
   - File 1.3
- Folder 2
  +- File 2.1
- Folder 3
- File 0.1
- File 0.2
- File 0.3

File 2.1 will be listed “above” file 0.1 even if it should sort later, because it is part of the group of “Folder 2” that is supposed to go first.

I wasn’t clear about what you were trying to achieve but if you wanted to have something like “all the files from all the expanded folders sort to the bottom and order between all the files from all the folders, while all the folders that own the files are listed at the top without context”, then that’s not possible - and I’m also think this is not a good user interface anyway.

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5

Thank you for the detailed answer. I am looking at the expanded folders behavior that you describe, however I was hoping that I could sort the Folders by name and the files underneath by another method, e.g. by date:

+- Folder a (sorted alphabetically)
+- Folder b (sorted alphabetically)
 - Some file (sorted by date)
 - Some other file (sorted by date)
+- Folder c (sorted alphabetically)
Most recent file (sorted by date)
Other file (sorted by date)
Oldest file (sorted by date)

I realize that with the Expandable folders option that view could be confusing.

6

Ah, I see. Then what @meven said - this isn’t possible. When looking at a view, all the files in the view are sorted by the same column - even those that under expandable folders.

While not as terrible idea is the one I speculated at above, I still think that having multiple different sorting criteria in the same view will be confusing and also hard to implement from a UX perspective.

Please see if using split screen (“dual pane mode”) in Dolphin will help you with what you want to do.

7

Hi bobmorane

Like gus77 said.

Try split view. Then you can do whatever you want with the categories. One side has name only. The other side has created only. I checked it and it works.

Vektor