Obsidian/Joplin does NOT support manual/arbitrary sorting of folders or notes | Hacker News Reader

Obsidian/Joplin does NOT support manual/arbitrary sorting of folders or notes

4 pointslilerjee3 comments

When I finally decided to try Obsidian, I discovered that it couldn't sort folders (except for the default alphabetical sorting). Further searching revealed that most note-taking software (including Joplin) didn't allow manual or arbitrary sorting of folders or notes.

I believe manual or arbitrary sorting is a basic function that any bookmark manager or note-taking software should provide.

Why can't most software do this? Is it that difficult?

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Obsidian has the philosophy that the filesystem is the source of all truth, and it's showing directly the filesystem without any obvious layer in-between. The reason is, that you should be able to read your data with any other app and have the same amount of data accessible. So from their POV, there is not really any place to store the information for the sorting. Adding it to the filename, would annoy the people, so It's up to you to choose your own plugin allowing this.

Also, with the new bases-features, you can easily create your own sorting with a table, or whichever view you prefer.

Arbitrary sorting can be really useful for relatively short lists, like a todo, but seems to me to be a lot less useful for thousands of items. And most cases where I would want that, like grouped by topic, is a better use case for tags, or the topic can be included in the title and work with alphabetical sorting.

But good news, niche requirements can be satisfied on both platforms by writing an extension!

Sorting or queuing is a common occurrence in life and work. For example, sorting the exam scores of students in the same grade at a school. Sorting is useful for lists with a few items or a lot of items.

Arbitrary sorting is particularly useful for prioritizing tasks.

Tags are mainly used for identification or grouping, and are quite different from sorting; the two are distinct.

Given the universality of sorting or queuing in real life, I believe it should be a fundamental feature of note-taking software.

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