Unconventional and counterintuitive filename sorting: "." comes after all other characters, should come before

[php4fan]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: 1.84.2
• OS Version: Manjaro linux

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a project that has files with these names:

functions.php
functions_admin.php
functions_user.php

2. Look at the list of files in the left panel ("Explorer" I think it's called)

Expected behavior

They should be sorted in this order:

functions.php
functions_admin.php
functions_user.php

This is the prevailing convention everywhere, it has always been, and for good reason, because it's the only right one. If not in general, certainly for file names.
The dot is commonly conventionally used to separate file name from file extension. Therefore, xxxxx followed by a dot means a filename xxxxx followed by nothing. And nothing intuitively comes before anything. That's why the dot usually comes before any other (normal) character at least when sorting file names.
Again, not only is this the way sorting filenames has always been done and is done everywhere, it is the right way of doing it because it makes sense.

Observed behavior

They are sorted like this:

functions_admin.php
functions_user.php
functions.php

i.e. the dot (".") comes after any other character.
This is confusing, counterintuitive, illogical, and contrary to prevailing and long-standing conventions. There's no justification for such behavior.

I have seen the same issue before in other pieces of software in Linux (I think starting recently), so VSCode is not alone, but that doesn't make it any less wrong, and it's the exception, not the norm.

[lramos15]

Try changing your sort options to unicode

[php4fan]

That fixes the dot but it messes up the underscore.
With "unicode", the underscore apparently comes after all letters; so with unicode now foobar will come before foo_bar which is also counterintuitive and contrary to prevailing conventions.

[lramos15]

That matches macOS explorer at least. I think convention varies

[php4fan]

Yes, MacOS is crap when it comes to this kind of things. Apple usually goes against conventions by design.

[php4fan]

Either way, having to choose between "dot comes before letters but underscore comes after" and viceversa makes no sense. Nor does the fact that that choice goes together with "default" (whatever that means) vs Unicode.

[php4fan]

And what if I wanted to choose Uppercase first or Lowercase first. What would the behavior of underscore and dot be in those cases? Overall the choice of sorting is utter nonsense.

[lramos15]

Hmmm this is with unicode

And here's the way the sort works

vscode/src/vs/base/common/comparers.ts

Lines 79 to 89 in 168df5b

	/** Compares full filenames by unicode value. */
	export function compareFileNamesUnicode(one: string | null, other: string | null) {
	one = one || '';
	other = other || '';
	if (one === other) {
	return 0;
	}
	return one < other ? -1 : 1;
	}

[php4fan]

Ok, it seems unicode groups uppercase first, which renders it useless unless you are one of the few people who would want uppercase first.

With the files I have, the one I was looking for with an underscore was at the end rather than at the beginning and I mistakenly attributed that to the underscore.

This is even worse.

So the choice is between:

default: "" < "a" < "." => crap
unicode: all uppercase < all lowercase => crap
upper: crap by definition unless that's what you want (who knows how it treats "" and "."
lower: same

[lramos15]

Maybe keep an eye on #27286 which tracks the idea of being able to provide a custom sort order

[php4fan]

These three choices should be independent of each other:

• lowercase first vs upper case vs mixed
• unicode or not (whatever "not unicode" is)
• special characters (e.g. "_" and ".") before or after letters and numbers

Probably the last one should be even more granular (or not exist at all and be all before including dot), because even if someone wanted characters like "_" and "-" to come after letters, it may still be convenient for "." to come before, because it separates the file name from the extension (i.e. you would want "xxxx" to come before "xxxx + anything", before the extension).