SCM - Sorting Changes by FileSystem's "Modified Date"

[BorisAnthony]

Re-requesting this feature as it seems to have been missed?

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Context

Between 2016 and 2020, several Issue tickets were submitted around the ability to "sort and filter and group" the Changes view in the SCM drawer.
#3918
#30199
#40712

"Sort changes by date modified" was explicitly requested several times within each of the above, with positive comments by several users as desirable. The feature was also explicitly the primary request of Issues like:
#28445
#71437

In 2020 @joaomoreno and @lszomoru implemented a bunch of stuff and released most of the requested functionality (amazing!)
#99768
#101116

However, the ability to sort the Changes list by Date Modified specifically seems to not have been implemented, nor explicitly addressed. My sense, reading across the linked issues, is that "sort by date modified" was perhaps misunderstood and lumped together with "sort by status", which is not the same.
If there was a technical reason not to implement it, this was not mentioned in any of the above.

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The Feature Request

It would be great if the existing Sort/Filter functionality in the SCM included FileSystem criteria such as Date Modified (probably the most useful).

Use Cases have been described in the above linked previous Issues.

• When one forgets to stage/commit after frenzied "flow state" development work (sure, "shouldn't happen in the professional environments" but many of us are hobbyists and do not need to follow Best Practices ;), one ends up with a long list of changed files which would span what should be multiple separate stagings and commits.
• Support tickets quickly addressed without committing between each, followed up after the fact.
• etc…

[gjsjohnmurray]

You seem to be asking for sorting but your issue title refers to filtering.

[BorisAnthony]

Edited the title! After reading all the issue tickets and spending an hour writing this one, I fumbled the title! Thank you for catching that.

Yes, Sort by (file system) Date Modified

😅

[vscodenpa]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscodenpa]

This feature request has not yet received the 20 community upvotes it takes to make to our backlog. 10 days to go. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscodenpa]

🙂 This feature request received a sufficient number of community upvotes and we moved it to our backlog. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[brl0]

This is a great write-up and I really appreciate the background research put in! I wonder if implementing sorting by various FileSystem criteria might be overly broad or complex, at least initially, and might overlook a quicker and simpler more targeted improvement.

IMO, the core need is the ability to sort the changes by the FileSystem modification time, which seems like a natural and common way to want to view changes. While I sometimes prefer the tree view, I would argue that when viewing as a flattened list, sorting by modification time is perhaps more useful than sorting by name, or at least so it seems in my mind. I often find myself trying to identify the most recent changes made by some tool or process, or trying to revisit some recent changes to recall or compare some previous notable intermediate state, and this sorting option would be extremely helpful in these situations.

I totally get the tendency to over-implement these requests by making this an extensible feature, which would be great, but I would suggest avoiding over-engineering this to support arbitrary sorting, at least for now, and simply extend the current set of sort options already provided.

Finally, and most importantly, thanks to the team, contributors, and Microsoft for such an awesome tool!