[Thunar-dev] Sort by MIME category

[Jasper Huijsmans]

2007/7/29, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk>:
>
> On 28 Jul 2007, at 11:48, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
>
> > sayan at crans.org wrote:
> >>>> Like many file managers, Thunar has a "sort by type" option. Is
> >>>> this
> >>>> based simply on file extension?
> >>>>
> >>>> Would it be possible to sort by MIME category? I would like to have
> >>>> images separated from audio and text files for example, with all
> >>>> known
> >>>> image formats grouped together. Inside a MIME category, files
> >>>> could then
> >>>> be sorted alphabetically or by MIME type.
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks for this great file manager.
> >>> "Sort by Type" does sorting based on the comment of the MIME type.
> >>>
> >> I am sorry but this is not sorting based on the MIME category.
> >>
> >> In my work folder, I have files of kind (as reported by file
> >> properties
> >> in Thunar 0.8.0, sorted by type):
> >>
> >> Gimp Image
> >> EPS Image
> >> PDF document
> >> plain text
> >> PNG Image
> >>
> >> I would like the following sorting:
> >>
> >> (application category)
> >> PDF document
> >>
> >> (image category)
> >> Gimp Image
> >> EPS Image
> >> PNG Image
> >>
> >> (text category)
> >> plain text
> >
> > That would be possible. But possibly confusing to the user.
>
> Yeah it's confusing for some types, for example: application/ogg, or
> application/postscript ... these are not actually application filetypes.

Quite a while ago I saw a mockup for Nautilus that does this, maybe it
has been implemented, I don't know. It looked really good. I think we
might even have talked about it here, but it's too long ago to
remember. Or I'm just getting old ;-)

Thunar would have to be rather smart about container types like ogg,
so it might not be possible to implement it well, given the current
state of mime-type handling.

-- 
        Jasper