id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	branch_state	votes
3157	Unify sort arrow's direction	egmont	andrew_b	"The arrow's direction (in the ""Name | Size | Modify time"" header line) is inconsistent across skins.

(i) In ""dark"" and ""darkfar"", the up arrow ↑ denotes the list is ascending, whereas the down arrow ↓ means the list is descending. Many other skins (""default"", ""double-lines"", ""gotar"", ""mc46"") mimic this behavior with the ""'"" and "","" ascii characters.

This would make sense if it was e.g. list of numbers written from left to right. But it's a list that is laid from the top to the bottom, introducing a confusing inversion of the semantics. That is, an arrow pointing upwards means that the list is growing downwards.

This behavior doesn't sound logical to me, and is against how other UI implementations approach the problem. Just one example: the ""Order by"" line at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mc/

(ii) Many other skins (""featured"", ""nicedark"", ""modar*"", ""sand256"", ""xoria256"") probably figured out that it doesn't make too much sense and swapped the two. Here an arrow pointing downwards means the alphabetical list goes downwards. I believe this is the one that makes sense. However they pay the price of being confusing in the skin definition, since they have ""sort-sign-up = ↓"" and ""sort-sign-down = ↑"".

I recommend cleaning up this situation so that all the skins behave as (ii). However, to stop the inversion in the skin files, I recommend the skins listed in (ii) to be modified, and also the meaning of the two characters should be swapped in the source code.

Further nitpicking: The default skin currently shows an apostrophe ""'"" by default which looks quite nice. With the change, it will show a comma "","" by default and that's not so nice visually. Unfortunately we need to stick to ascii for compatibility. I think a dot ""."" instead of the comma would be just as good but would look nicer. Or a space would do too (it's not important to mark the default order, it's enough if the reverse order is marked. The feature would still be discoverable since clicking on the Name, Size... labels also reverses the order.) If a space is chosen, I'd maybe consider changing the order of this symbol and the next letter (n, s or m).
"	defect	closed	minor	4.8.12	mc-skin	4.8.11	fixed					merged	committed-master