Xfce Forum

frisket

Member

Registered: 2025-10-01

Posts: 1

Sort desktop icons by date

I'm running Linux Mint 22.1 with Xfwm4.
How can I set my desktop icons to be sorted by ascending order of date (and stay that way)?
That is: oldest in top left corner; most recent at the bottom of the rightmost column; and new icons go at the end of the rightmost column.

bggf

Member

Registered: 2026-04-13

Posts: 12

Re: Sort desktop icons by date

Hi there,

Interesting question and I found this link with a script you could use to start off:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/330986/ … me-in-xfce

Basically in xfce4 the icons will be put into a file in "~/.config/xfce4/desktop" my file is called icons.screen.latest.rc

The format is pretty straightforward and the file has multiple lines like this:

/home/bggf/Desktop/test]
row=1
col=1

The script described above will read your current configuration file and re-arrange the icons alphabetically.
The post also tells you howto add a right-click command on the desktop to re-arrange (re-run the script) any time you need to.

You would have to add something logic make it work on the file creation dates rather than alphabetically sorting the files (as it does now) and pay attention to the file name you want to open/close in "~/.config/xfce4/desktop". The author had a file called "icons.screen0", so he probably had multiple screens, also he tested his screen row capacity and it was 8 rows (this is commented in his script, you will have to check your screen).
Of course you should create a copy of your current file before trying, I didn't test the script myself