[SheetsSheet] sorting list of sheets jumps away from SheetsSheet

[geekscrapy]

I've found the the sorting keys do not work as expected on the Shift+S (sheetsIndex) sheet.

I was expecting to be able to sort by name (as the default selected column) however [ opens a sheet. In my case it's the same sheet all the time irrelevant of the order.
I've also found that this isn't consistent. Sometimes [ does sort as expected, and ] opens a sheet.

To be honest I'm unsure what is going to happen each time when I hit [ or ] on that sheet

To replicate, open a couple of sheets/files, hit Shift+S, and click [ or ] to test

[anjakefala]

Hi @geekscrapy!

Believe it or not, there is no bug. ^^;

Shift+S is actually the Sheets Sheet for the Sheets Stack, which is why you are seeing funky behaviour when you move rows around. This is the actual stack for your sheets. When play with a metasheet, you are directly affecting VisiData's understanding of the session.

Since the top sheet is the sheet at the top of the stack, that is the visible sheet. When you are viewing the Sheets Stack, that is always going to be the sheets row, representing the sheet you are viewing.

When you sort, occassionally you will bump another row to the top of the stack, and then you will jump to that row. I should make a page in the docs about this. I just noticed that it is not really spoken about in @jsvine's tutorial.

If you want to play with a Sheets Sheet like a regular sheet, you can "freeze" it with g'. If you want to check out a list of all of the precious loaded sheets that you had accessed in your session, type gS to open the Global Sheets (used to be the Sheets Graveyard). This is not representing the stack, and therefore is sort-able.

Something we may consider @saulpw, is giving that sheet the name sheets_stack. That may have made it less surprising that sorting had an affect.

[klartext]

If it's not becoming part of the documentation, I think there will be more issues with the same topic being opened over time ;-)
I opened one about one hour ago btw. And I was redirected to here by Anja, after she closed my issue...

[anjakefala]

Want to add it to our documentation @klartext? =) https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/blob/develop/docs/sheets.md

[anjakefala]

Or make an issue here to add it to this section? https://github.com/jsvine/intro-to-visidata/blob/master/docs/basics/understanding-sheets.rst

[klartext]

I let that task be reserved to the experts ;-)

[klartext]

But I found some broken links in some of the docs and could report them.
Could do that during the next days I think.

[jsvine]

Thanks for the reminder on this. I've added a note my tutorial re. sorting the Sheets Sheet, at the end of this subsection: https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/basics/understanding-sheets/#how-to-use-the-sheets-sheet

I wonder though: What would the VisiData maintainers think about disabling sorting on the Sheets Sheet (rather than modifying the Sheet Sheet's behavior). Perhaps I'm thinking narrow-mindedly, but I can't see much of a use-case for sorting that metasheet, given the almost-always-unintended consequences.

[saulpw]

That's a really good point. But maybe we could just override it, so that it only sorted the rest of the elements. The thing is, do we want to do this for slide too? any others?

[jsvine]

Ah, very interesting re. slide. My two cents on that (and potentially relevant to other commands):

• Sliding feels much more intentional. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but my instinct that people are much less likely to slide a row up to the first position than to accidentally (or out of simple curiosity) sort the sheet.

• I do find sliding on the Sheets Sheet useful, e.g., to bring a sheet higher into the stack (or, perhaps more accurately, into my field of vision) for easier finding later. Or did you just mean overriding what happens when you try to slide a row into the first position?

[saulpw]

We can do either. For the sort, I think we'd have to do self.rows = [self.rows[0]] + sorted(self.rows[1:]) anyway, so maybe it makes sense to override slide in that special case only.

[klartext]

The reason I tried to sort the sheets-sheet is to have a certain order of the documents.
If the filename reflects a certain order (for logfiles for example with date in the name, it's reflecting the timely order of the contents inside the files - and therefore inside the sheets), it may be convenient to sort the sheets, so that when going back to the sheets by closing the (new ordered) sheets sheet, the sheets can be viewed in the order that was created by sorting the filename-column of the sheets-sheet.
For fast browsing into the data-sheets one by one the right order ist nice for a quick overview - without the need of merging the data before.
So, IMO there is a good reason to use that intuitive approach for sorting the Sheets-Sheet.
The Sheets-Stack as it exists now under the name of Sheets-Sheet - if that thing does makes sense at all (what was it designed for? What are it's uses?), would need explanation (documentation) and maybe should be less easy to reach, or modified in the one or the other way, to avoid unexpected/unintuitive behaviour.
-> docs: "You can use this adavanced feature, which looks like a bug, but be careful..."

[saulpw]

Please note that this should be fixed in v2.1 and work "as expected" (instead of counterintuitively "by design").

[klartext]

Thank you!