BUT, I would suggest that the option to SORT them should always be available, even if there’s a notice that it’s a ONE-TIME deal and you can’t go back.
Yup, that’s how the menu command will work, with an option to no longer badger you with the warning once you’ve read it.
So apparently using the keyword trick as a workaround won’t work either.
That worked fine for me—perhaps your selection ended up in the editor when you were looking at them there. This keywords panel command targets the active selection, which can end up being nothing if you click into the editor corkboard, for example.
But to be clear I meant that suggestion more as a thing for going forward, where one would be tagging items as they come across them, much as you did when creating the collection the first time around—rather than as a way of sorting a collection after the fact as a work-around for not being able to do so at the moment. I.e. if you want collections that are binder sorted always, that approach is the best way to do it since search collections always keep themselves sorted; it isn’t something you have to do over and over whenever you add new items.
AHHH - What DID work was to select them all in the collection and add them to a NEW collection. PLEASE DON’T FIX THAT BUG!!!* It is a fine workaround. Document it and call it a FEATURE !!!
At the risk of going way off topic, the ramifications of it not working correctly are very broad, and break a lot of intended workflows throughout the software. You’re looking at it, I think, from the point of view of it “solving” this one very specific missing menu command, but consider the following intended capabilities meant to be provided by the ability to organise items:
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You have a carefully organised collection you want to duplicate. How do you go about doing that right now?
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Say you take a chapter’s text items into a collection with the purpose of reworking the flow of information within it. You shift things up and down until you get them just right, and then what? What you’re supposed to be able to do is select the collection and drag it back into the folder they came from. As of now, you have to laboriously do this yourself in a locked editor, duplicating your efforts. Funnily enough, this use case right here was the entire impetus for designing the Collection feature itself, back in the day. Obviously it has grown beyond the focal point of giving one a freeform place to experiment with text flow and then implement it (or not), but that it still does not work is a problem.
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Sorting in the outliner is meaningless outside of what you can see with your eyes. Outliner sorting is meant to be a tool you can optionally use to sort items permanently, by any field of metadata you please (staving off endless requests to add dozens of options to the sort tool above the sidebar or the Sort menu).
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Merging a selection of reorganised items ignores the order and merges in binder order always. That’s a bad one since backing out of a bad merge requires manual labour to undo.
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When copying text from an organised list, the copy ignores the order and copies in binder order.
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Compiling a current selection should use the order of that selection rather than the binder order.
There are probably many other circumstances and combinations of features that would benefit from being able to organise items freely and then take action on those things in a way that respects the work you’ve put into putting them into that order. Much the above can be boiled down to the question: what is the point of organising the text via the diverse means of doing so if all you can do with it is look at it?
But I think chief among the reasons is that it follows basic human expectations. If you pick up a basket of fruit organised by colour, when you set it down you expect the fruit to be in the same order, you don’t expect it to magically re-order itself according to how they were when sitting on the counter.
So to conclude, for those cases where you do for whatever reason want to set the basket down in a way that doesn’t match how things are in the basket, there is the sort menu command—which changes how the basket is organised. Clear, simple and back into the realm of human expectation.
If you figure it out let me know! I am aware of some bugs with keyword assignment failing, but I think they are all in drag and drop rather than right-click.