Sorting the documents in the Binder

In some cases, It could be useful to sort the documents in the Binder, for example in alphabetical order.

When I asked about this possibility, somebody told me it was not possible because it’s something people don0t use with Scrivener.

Now I discovered it’s possible to to it: just sort the docs in the Outline View, select them and “copy” them to the Binder.

You can watch this small video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGTOtQ6_rOw

Very nifty and useful–thank you.

If you want to sort documents in the Binder by name only (but not by say label or word count etc), then you don’t need to use Outline mode – you can do it directly from the Binder.

Select the folder containing the documents you want to sort, then Documents > Sort. You can choose from Ascending, Descending and Shuffle.

The sort in both Binder and Outline appears to be “alphanumeric”, meaning that non-numbers are sorted alphabetically but aligned numbers are sorted numerically. This is opposed to lexicographical sorting, where shorter items come first among items with the same prefix. Example:
Alphanumeric sort:
AD197
AD1969
AD19700605
Lexicographical sort:
AD1969
AD197
AD19700605

Personally, I wish the default were the latter, but I’d be amazingly happy were it even available as an option.

(In case you’re wondering, I had an idea to use a date as the first word of each title or, better, as custom metadata; this would help me organize the fragments of a larger manuscript. But I don’t always know the exact date, so AD197 just means “sometime in the 1970s”, as opposed to AD0197, which would be in the early Christian era, and so on. With lexicographic sorting, that would have worked like a champ, but with alphanumeric sorting, it’s not possible without manually sorting everything. The second half of the idea is to interpret AD as hexadecimal digits, thereby giving me a neatly sortable and readily interpretable date notation range of 2.56 million years, from 000000 to FF9999.)