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Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience that even non-technical users already have.

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It's not just the one decision though; there are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of these decisions in most software. You want every single one of them to have an option? You want it to support every single combination? At some point, it is ridiculous. Sometimes you just have to decide how your software is going to work and not leave every single decision to the user.

It may be one of thousands of decisions, but it's one of a handful that are exposed in the user interface as a fundamental action.

In a file manager? Any more than the displayed thumbnails, icon size, whether folders are separated from files, whether images are separated from videos, what video types are supported, what file types are opened inline, what the click and double click behaviours are, etc?

And yeah kde has settings for all these but kde is also known for being too configurable.

How the files sort seems kinda important. It gets at the core behavior of the program. It's not something superficial like a default icon, which the user probably can change.

You don’t let every decision to the user, you make good defaults, but leave the option to override to the user! And thousands isn’t scary as long as groups/tags/search work, so what’s ridiculous about empowering the user?

Increasing the number of different possible combinations of settings your software can be running with by a factor of one nonillion is not a choice I’d make if I wanted to have any confidence in its reliability and security.

That's why you write small programs. It won't take long for most programs to bloat to the level where they're dealing with nonillions of combinations, whether the user has control over those combinations or not.

There's such thing as too many options, and there's also such thing as too few. This is one of the important ones. I'd say that macOS, Gnome, and Windows have definitely hidden or removed a lot of important options in the past decade, and despite the modern slickness mesmerizing people into thinking they're easier to use, they're actually harder to use as a result.

(I say this as a professional developer and power-user of all 3 desktops over the past 25 ish years, who also helps non-technical family and friends a few times every year. Some people will be like "oh I'm so bad at computers lol" or "oh this is a piece of junk huh" but really the UI just got dumber in the name of "ease of use", and the expert has to be called in to decipher it.)

I might be wrong on this, but I vaguely recall that on macOS back when you could commonly option-click to reveal advanced options, if you held option when clicking a sort it would change how it sorted from alphabetical to lexical or vice versa. I’m not a thousand percent sure of it, though, I think when I needed it I was able to set a directory preference via terminal to change how a specific directory was sorted and it was an option there. MacOS had (or has) a lot of buried options which I presume date back to its origins as a Unix as well as a convenience to its developers. A lot of the command line utilities were hacked calls to graphical settings code though, so it wasn’t very stable version to version as the UI calls changed and nobody prioritized non-UI bug fixes or breaking changes. These days CLI is nearly forgotten or assumed to be an exploit vector - see Screen Time data for example.

But the alternative would be a surprise to people who assume "by name" will order numbers, including those who are new to technology (and I think most non-technical people who sort things manually unknowingly order numbers).

We want to minimize surprises and mysteries, but computers have so much hidden complexity it's impossible to eliminate them. If users were shown a full description of how every feature on their computer worked before using it, they'd quickly start ignoring the descriptions. There should probably be a tooltip or "manual entry" for "by name" for those who are curious, and it should never be labeled "alphabetical" because it's not. But cases like the author's, where he assumes a feature works differently than most people (including the designers) assume, can't be helped.

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