Xfce Forum

cawa

Member

Registered: 2020-07-30

Posts: 1

Thunar et al.: Sort-Indicator

Dear all,
I've often wondering about the wrong sort-indicators in linux file managers.
Unfortunately also in Thunar. Could not find any answers in the web.
Descending sorted colums are indicated with an arrow (triangle) leading upwards and vice versa.
Can anyone explain the reason for that? Ascending should be indicated with ^, noth descending.
Everywhere (www, win) ascending sort indicator is ^. But not in the unix world. Why?
Am I the only person who finds this annoying?
Cheers
Carsten

jesus2099

Member

Registered: 2020-05-04

Posts: 20

Re: Thunar et al.: Sort-Indicator

I completely agree.
I am still always completely confused by the whole sort order in Thunar, simply because of this reverse column sort order arrow display.
My brain cannot compute and I always click several times the arrows before finding what I want.

There was once a Thunar ticket 13844 – Column sort arrow direction is the wrong way round where it was said that it was a GTK issue, linking to an upstream GNOME Human Interface Guidelines ticket Bug 305277 – Guidance on sort order arrow direction is opposite of prevailing convention.
As this old ticket is now read-only, I created a new bug ticket Column sort arrow direction is the wrong way round (#468) in new Thunar GitLab system.

The commenter proposed the following work-around:

You can append gtk-alternative-sort-arrows = true to ~/.config/gtk-2.0/settings.ini (Thunar 1.6.x) or ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini (current master) so every GTK application will have the desired arrow direction.

2017-09-08 01:03:23 CEST

This did not work for me (Debian 10 Xfce Thunar 1.8.4).
I created these settings.ini files (they did not exist in these folders) and tried =true and =TRUE (with and without spaces around the equal sign).

Last edited by jesus2099 (2021-01-07 18:06:11)