(Archived) Feature Request: allow notebook specific sort

[Fran_K 1]

Many times during the day I find myself changing the sort order of notebooks in order to either see things in their "natural" order, or in most recently used order. This tends to fall along the lines of the purpose of the notebook. Some notebooks are for ongoing work and the the most recent note is usually the one I want. Other notebooks are intended to be reference materials and the "natural" order, alphabetic or creation date is what I want. If you put 400 notes of references with regular titles and randomly update them it is obvious why this is a problem. Likewise with a few hundred images that do not contain text.

Yes, I can query but I find it faster to scroll a list to the specific item which I know is there than to type in a string and poke around and hope the term was specific enough to get the item I want. Having to swap sort order over and over introduces a lot of friction into my workflow. It would be nice to be able to specify the sorting for each notebook.

Also, it would be nice to have a sort option that handles numbers in titles "correctly". When doing a sort by title, the document named 1-X is near 10-X instead of 2-X. A lot of technical documents tend to use 1.1.0 .. 1.20.1 and the expectation of most users is that the numbers be ordered in number order instead of alphabet order.

Thanks! Evernote is great, keep up the good work!

--fran

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback!

[Fran_K 1]

OK, a few years have passed, many other big features have been added, but nothing on this front. This seems like a relatively minor bit of UI hackery to get working fully and would be a life saver for those of us with large note collections. Some of my notebooks are meant to capture information over time and are best displayed by most recent modification first. Other notebooks are meant to be reference material when a specific order is best. It adds a lot of friction to have to constantly change the sort order when switching notebooks. To get around this I have manually modified each note in a reference notebook to use my order so that they end up in reverse date order. That is painful to update when you have to edit a note in that group and have to re-date 100+ notes!

For those of us who write a great deal and use Evernote to manage our notes, UI speed-bumps like this are a major irritation. Little things like this, and the ability to really edit all aspects of a note are important. I'd love to see each notebook have an individual sort order and default to the preferred ordering. Being able to set a custom order would be very cool.

Thanks for listening! Keep up the good work!

--fran

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

i don't want a notebook specific sort order, but i would like to see the ability to:

1. specify the order of notes

2. easily change the order

think onenote (microsoft users) or scrivener (mac), or notebooks (ios). practically speaking, if i am writing an essay with ten parts and decide to put part three before part two, i'd like to just drag the note over. because you cannot fix the order of notes in evernote AND be able to reorder easily, i tend not to use evernote for any kind of content creation. evernote doesn't handle relationships between notes well. setting up a note with links and reordering them there is clumsy, but the best solution i have come up with so far.

the flat system of notes is great in general, but for content creation, i'd like to afix a hierarchy. would it be possible to designate a folder and have all notes in it follow a designated order instead of getting sorted by date and so forth?

[jefito 5,589]

Of course anythings's possible; hard to say if they're in Evernote's plans or not. Most of these features have been requested / discussed in the forums in the past. For content creation, you might want to look into using note links in a master to organize related notes.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Of course anythings's possible; hard to say if they're in Evernote's plans or not. Most of these features have been requested / discussed in the forums in the past. For content creation, you might want to look into using note links in a master to organize related notes.

yeah. i have tried that (mentioned above), but i find it clumsy. the copy / paste out of evernote is also dicey (no line breaks for me with 4.1.6), so i am pretty unlikely to use evernote this way anytime soon. all i have is simple text, but it keeps getting mangled. that is a topic for another thread, though

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

if i am writing an essay with ten parts and decide to put part three before part two,

IMO, this doesn't sound like something EN would do any time soon, since that's not really their focus. One workaround is something like this. Although the post is about notebooks, the theory would apply to notes, too. Assuming you wanted to use EN badly enough for this purpose.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

thanks bnf. i tried but got annoyed. it isn't worth it for me

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

thanks bnf. i tried but got annoyed. it isn't worth it for me

Yeah, I sorta figured that.