[Techtalk] Dolphin sort order

[Wim De Smet]

Hey,

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> I use Kubuntu Lucid Lynx with the Dolphin and Konqueror file managers
> installed by default. Both share the same settings, but I tend to use
> Dolphin the most.
>
> I have the view set to sort files in ascending order by name. My idea
> of what that means is that it should go from A to Z so that if I wish
> to find a file that starts with A, I look at the top of the list, and
> if I want to find a file that starts with Z, I look at the bottom of
> the list. Dolphin and Konqueror have their own idea of how file
> sorting should be done. They sort first the upper case hidden files,
> then the lower case hidden files, then the upper case files, then the
> lower case files. For example:
> [...]
>
> I would really like to have all the same letters together, like this:
> [...]

I don't use Dolphin, but in the terminal and in nautilus sort order is
governed by the current active locale. It's usually the way you
describe you want it for any locale but the default "C" locale. Try
typing "locale" in a terminal window and see what you get back, I
think sort order is governed by LC_COLLATE. It might be as easy as
installing locale support and selecting an appropriate one (e.g.
en_US) in your distribution config tools somewhere (in regular ubuntu
it's the "language support" app).

If the locale is set correctly it could be that Dolphin just uses
naive sort order (if you sort a bunch of strings based on ascii code,
you get the above). Might be configurable in Dolphin itself then. But
the correct way of doing it would be to follow locale preferences. All
GNU tools use this setup, e.g. sort and ls.

regards,
Wim