Is there any way to customise sorting of directories in the index?

Chris Green cl at isbd.net
Thu Apr 8 16:55:05 UTC 2021


On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 11:31:34AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 11:23:26AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > I have a about 40 or so folders where I save mails I want to keep,
> > with names such as 'shopping', 'motorcycle' and so on.  By default
> > these are sorted alphabetically in the index which is not ideal.  I
> > save things in 'shopping' far more frequently than elsewhere so it
> > would be really handy if that was at the top or at least near the top. 
> > 
> > Is there any way to customise the sort order?  I suppose the ideal
> > would be 'most recently used' at the top but even reverse alphabetical
> > would improve things.
> > 
> > I *could* rename 'shopping' to 'Shopping' to fix that one but I'd
> > really like a more generally applicable solution.
> > 
> Ah, oops, I've just discovered the sort_browser setting which
> addresses this issue to some extent.  However some explanation of the
> settings might be useful:-
> 
>     count - does this mean the count of messages in the directory,
>     what about if it contains further subdirectories?
> 
>     date - date of what?  If it's just the date of the directory it's
>     not terribly useful!  
> 
>     size - does it work or mean anything with maildir?
> 
>     unread - what does this mean?
> 
Sorry, talking to myself here so much!

Anything other than alphabatical sorting is pretty useless with a long
list of directories, especially as it often puts .. somewhere other
than at the top.  If you have many directories at one level (my
top level directory has 32) finding anything in it other than by an
alphabetical sort is painful!  (I tried 'date' to see what it did).

I think my solution of changing shopping to Shopping may be the most
sensible one.

-- 
Chris Green


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