I am trying to alphabetically sort documents within a folder. On my Mac running Scrivener 3.4, there is not a “Sort” item in the Documents menu (as some people on this forum have claimed that there is). There is however a “Sort” item in the “Edit” menu. That menu Item shows a sub-menu with “Ascending” and “Descending” options. These items are correctly disabled when a folder is not selected. However, choosing either “Ascending” or “Defending” menu option does nothing to the order of the documents in the selected folder. There seems to be a more cumbersome option, selecting the folder, going to outline view, clicking on the sort carrot in the document name column, indeed sorts, first ascending, then descending, then reverting to the binder orders of the documents. If one selects all of the documents in the outliner, and drags these to the binder folder that they are from, Scrivener sets their orders to how they were last ordered in the outline view. But why doesn’t the Sort menu item do what it is supposed to do?
OK: after some trial and error, found that my choice not to name my documents (this is a folder of documents that make up entries into my book’s glossary/index and all begin with the topic word or phrase), so that Scrivener auto-names them or pseudo-names them by the first few words in the first line of each document’s text. It is this pseudo-name facility that seem to be tripping up Scrivener’s Edit/Sort/ menu action. But here is something odd, if I go to the outline view with the same folder selected, I can sort the documents by name (pseudo-name) by clicking on the title of the name column (one click sorts alphabetically, next click sorts depending, next click returns the order of documents to the binder order). Then, if I select and drag all rows as they are ordered in the outline view to the folder in the binder that they are from, the binder then updates to the new sorted order!(?) And here is another strange anomaly in Scrivener’s interface, you can go to the cork board view and rearrange document order and there is a special little button at the bottom of the view that allows you to commit the new manual sort to the binder order. If this button was also available in the outline view, things would be oh so much easier and intuitive. Speaking of intuitive and consistency, why isn’t there a way to sort alphabetically in the cork board view? But the real question is, why can’t one use the “Sort” menu item in the “Edit” menu, to sort binder documents that are pseudo-named when the same sort is provided in the outline view? Oh, and why is Sort not an option from the contextual menu when right clicking on a binder folder?