Suggested Feature: Custom Sort By Options

[KC Krupp 7]

I noticed that as I'm going through my notes, I often find that the sorting options are not particularly useful for me. I don't care so much about the date or even the title of a note as much as I care about how important that note is.

 

Idea #1: Custom Fields

One possible solution is to allow users to create a few custom fields and define values for these fields that would be assigned to notes just like tags would. Users can then sort by the values they define for their custom fields based on a defined priority.

Example:

I create a custom field and label it Custom Field and give it the following possible values:

• VALUE: HIGH    ORDER: 1
• VALUE: MED     ORDER: 2
• VALUE: LOW     ORDER: 3 

When assigned to notes and then sorted the sort by would use the order for the values as defined by the user.

 

Idea #2: Leverage Tags for Custom Sorting

Alternatively, you could allow the user to create custom sorts based on their tags. I'm including an example below to outline what I mean.

 

Example:

I have the following tags HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW, PERSONAL, UX, PROJECTS, BLOG

 

And 5 Notes: ABC (tagged as LOW, PERSONAL), EFG (tagged as BLOG), HIJ (tagged as HIGH, PERSONAL), KLM (tagged as MEDIUM), and NOP (tagged as HIGH)

 

I create a new sort, and define my sort in the following order and name it "Custom Sort:"

1. HIGH
2. MEDIUM
3. LOW

Now when I select Sort by Custom Sort, I would see my notes in the following order:

• HIJ
• NOP
• KLM
• ABC
• EFG

You could even define your sorts by multiple tags:

1. HIGH and BLOG
2. MEDIUM
3. LOW

Which since I have not Notes with both the tags HIGH and BLOG together I would get

• NOP
• KLM
• ABC
• EFG
• HIJ

While:

1. HIGH or BLOG
2. MEDIUM
3. LOW

Would give me:

• EFG
• HIJ
• NOP
• KLM
• ABC

Although, it would be fun to add secondary, and tertiary means of sorting as well.

[jefito 5,598]

Custom sorting has been suggested previously, a number of times in the forums. I don't think that they're too keen on adding new fields for sorting purposes; some folks just use special note title schemes. You can also do it via tag, but that's a little fraught if you have multiple tags per note. You might be able to do some kind of special tag scheme where the sorting tags are prefixed with some kind of special symbol, but I don't know that symbol sorting is consistent across Evernote clients.

[KC Krupp 7]

I totally get why they wouldn't want to add in custom fields, especially if the only added value is for sorting. This is why I think providing some sort of robust custom sort based on tags would be a better, albeit more difficult to design, solution; they'd have to figure out how to handle notes with multiple tags as part of the solution.

 

Maybe it's just me, but from a UX perspective, it seems strange that if this is common enough of a problem thta large numbers of users are creating custome titling schemes for their notes, which is a really flimsy workaround (if a user wants to change their system they have to go back and rename ALL of their saved notes, and it's really easy to misstype accidentally misstype the words you're using for your naming convention,) then it seems like something that would make sense to go onto the roadmap for future releases. Then again, maybe only a minority of users have an issue with the way it works today and I'm the exception, in which case, I get it (and would at least like that acknowledged by the staff.)

 

I'll give sorting based on symbols a shot (I currently use symbols as prefixes to my tags so I can quickly grab my most important tags in 1 or 2 keystrokes, ex: .next action, .read, /projectname, so it shouldn't be too hard to figure out the impact of sorting via symbol.

[KC Krupp 7]

So following up. There is a consistent sort treatment for symbols across at least the Windows and Android clients.

 

It appears as though when you add a tag to a note, the tags that get sorted first will move to the front of the tag list (with a few exceptions, such as - which will always display as the first tag, even though it dosn't sort that way.) The sort order for tags is as follows:

 

• Notes with no tags assigned to them display at the top of the sort.
• Symbols: !  "  #  $  %  &  (  )   *  -  '  .  :  ;  ?  @  [  \  ]  ^  _  `  {  |  }  (~ tilde)  +  <  =  >
  • The tilde is the squiggly line usually in the top-left corner of the screen. The evernote forum won't render it properly.
  • Commas are not recognized as valid values in a sort (which makes sense since tags are bascially comma separated)
  • - will override all other tags. Even if you have another tag beginning with !, if it also has a tag with - that note will display with the other - tags in the sort order; there may be others that do this as well, but I haven't gone through and tested this thoroughly.
  • ( and ) do funny things with sorts when you combine them with other tags, where sometimes they won't display in a set of results at all (this behavior is intermittent and I can't figure out how to duplicate it reliably)
• Numerals (1-9)
• Letters (A-Z)