Feeback Requested: Project Panel Sort Order Change

[jenkmeister]

For a very long time now, After Effects has used a sort order in the Project Panel that hasn't always sorted files containing numbers in an expected way. We are making a change today, starting with the AE Beta 23.4x18 release, that switches the sort order to a more expected case insensitive sort order that will work better for names containing numbers.

Please give it a go and let us know if this is better for you or if you prefer the previous sorting method. 

[the_dudes]

This had been annoying for years. It's great to hear you've changed it! A great little QOL improvement 👍

[Ron Ganbar]

Yes! Great that you've done this. Was really annoying.

[tristansummers]

Until I can turn of automatic number incrementing  completely it really makes no odds to me. If you have a number at the end of a name something will go tragically wrong at some point either way. 

[jenkmeister]

Got any examples of that so we can investigate?

btw, I just tried duplicating a solid 300+ times with the updated code, the increments are working as expected for me. 

[tristansummers]

It is a seperate issue and I don't think anyone is going to change it. I just don't want any incrementing at all unless it adds COPY to the original filename. If you have item_01, item_02, item_03 and you duplicate item_02 it becomes item_04 so I have no idea it is actually a version of item_02. Doesn't sound like an issue, unless you use version numbers and dates and sequential asset ordering and you don't import things all at the same time. If I import an asset called frame_222035 often AE will increment it's number so I can no longer find it at all. I have tried a lot of workarounds but I guess it just made the scripts and expressions easier for the coding to do it that way rather than Copy_01 like evrey other item duplication system in the world. 

If you are rigging and you have limb01, limb02 etc, those number are important. 

[jenkmeister]

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'm happy to add this to our quality of life backlog. Seems like a reasonable suggestion for us to look at as a duplication option.

[Mike Choo]

An example I hit a lot is having subfolders for Shot-01, Shot-02, etc. I often want to duplicate these folders (for example, so organise PS and AI assets by shot, but in different folders) - the aut-numbering means that the numbers can quickly get out of hand, and time needs to be spent manually renaming everything. A toggle setting for this would be super-useful.

[Shebbe]

I agree on this. For us it is also very annoying that AE auto increments numbers. We almost always have comps like CompName_9x16 that becomes CompName_9x17 after dupication. Most of the time you only want to rename a section at the beginning of such a name but for every time you do this also having to change the number at the end is slightly frustrating in a days work. I'm not sure if not renaming at all is a practical thing, perhaps as a setting for user prefs. But at least something that is in line with other Adobe software would be more likable like adding '[space]copy' at the end.

You could even add a new keyboard shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + D (when project panel is active) to duplicate with number increments for the cases you do want this behavior?

Just throwing ideas here.

[tristansummers]

Glad I am not the only one! 

Human beings have used numbers to organise things for thousands of years and so it is really important!

Leg 1 becomes leg 3 when it is leg 1 copy. 

Scene 1 becomes scene 46!

Stroyboard page 12 becomes Storyboard page 96

I will start with 0 duplicating to 1 instead of 2 please?!

Who counts 0-2-3-4?

[isosceles.vj]

Agreed, this behavor has long been a source of frustraction when I'm working on design iterations. For example, when I duplicate a bunch of comps and then it automatically changes ending number, that is a major hassle.

[iaa1]

This change goes deeper than that – you also moved special characters after numbers, for no reason above.  This breaks my template organization.  
Sorting is a basic way to keep data organized.  As long as the sort rules are fully documented do as you like.  You do a disservice by asking every user to experiment to see how it works.
By fully documented i mean .... where does each type of character fall in the order?  UC before or after LC or ignored?  Numbers sorted rationally (140 before 1300) or irrationally (by digit), sort each field (separated bu ".") separately?  And so on.  

[tristansummers]

140 will go before 1300 if you use correct padding though (0140 or maybe 00140 and 01300 to be safe). Not that the people supplying assets will ever understand that. And anyone how gives me a file with a"." that isn't followed by a file extension needs a Paddington lomg hard stare

[iaa1]

i use padding always

It appears that they are now using Unicode standard order.  But i'm not entirely certain. 
Film industry convention is that frame numbers should be preceeded by "." not by "_".   

[Shebbe]

Hello,

I noticed with the recent update that the new sorting order prioritizes numbers over "_" underscore symbol now. This is very frustrating for our team since we've always been using _ for folders we'd like to keep on top. Is there any reason to have this lower in rank with the new sorting method? I hope this gets switched back tbh. We'd need to resort to something else otherwise like 00_ which doesn't look nice and doesn't type fast.

[JohnColombo]

Hi @Shebbe,

I definitely feel the pain here; I also have used underscores for a long while to pin items to the top of my AE projects. I think School of Motion used to recommend this? While I will bring this feedback to the team, the old sorting order was less desirable/predictable in a lot of situations. The new order is much more ASCII compliant (though perhaps not fully) and the sort is more like what you'd see in most other applications.

Here is a rough chart of how ASCII sort prioritizes different characters. I've found that an asterisk—which sorts before all alphanumeric characters—is a good drop-in replacement for an underscore since it is also typed with the right hand on most keyboards.

To help with the transition to the new sorting method, here is a quick script that will replace any leading underscores in the whole project with an asterisk (or any character of your choice if you change the "replacementCharacter" string variable on the second line. As with anything that performs a batch action, be sure to back up your project first. The action is also undoable.

(function replaceLeadingUnderscoresInProjectItemNames() {
  var replacementCharacter = "*";

  function replaceLeadingUnderscores(theCollection) {
    for (var i = 1; i <= theCollection.items.length; i++) {
      var theProjItem = theCollection.item(i);

      theProjItem.name = theProjItem.name.replace(/^_/, replacementCharacter);

      if (theProjItem instanceof FolderItem) {
        replaceLeadingUnderscores(theProjItem);
      }
    }
  }

  app.beginUndoGroup([
    "Replace Leading '_' with '",
      replacementCharacter,
      "' in Project Item Names",
  ].join(""));

  replaceLeadingUnderscores(app.project);

  app.endUndoGroup();
})();

Cheers,

- John