Mac OS X’s Finder: Can’t have two list views sorted differently

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
July 5th, 2010 • 9:49 am

The other day, a reader wrote to me to point out that, “in the Finder, that when I open two windows, I can’t have them using different sortings.”

And sure enough, there seems to be an odd limitation, at least in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), with Finder windows in list view.

In Mac OS X, the Finder is no longer based on a purely spatial metaphor (one folder = one window). This means that you can display the contents of the same folder in two different windows at the same time.

These two different windows showing the contents of the same folder can be in two different view modes (column and list view, for example), or they can be in the same view mode.

However, when these two different windows showing the contents of the same folder are both in list view mode, in Snow Leopard, if you change the sorting criterion for one of the windows (by clicking on a column header), from “Name” to “Size,” for example, Mac OS X… automatically changes the sorting criterion for the other window as well!

This means that you cannot have two different windows showing the contents of the same folder in list view mode that are sorted using two different criteria at the same time.

It is rather odd. Why such a limitation? If you are going to break the spatial metaphor, you might as well completely break it and fully embrace the ability to display the contents of the same folder in two different windows at the same time with two different sorting criteria.

But Snow Leopard does not let you do that.

I cannot help but connect this to the other odd limitations that affect the list view mode in a Finder window in Snow Leopard when the window displays the results of a Spotlight search. In that case, the limitations affect the very criteria that you can use for sorting the search results.

As with those other limitations, I would tend to suspect that there are underlying issues in Snow Leopard’s Finder that Apple was not able to address in time for the release of the final software. And since Apple tends to limit itself to bug fixes in subsequent incremental system updates, this means that we won’t see any improvements in this area until at least Mac OS X 10.7. In addition, since the list view mode is usually treated by Apple’s engineers as a second-class citizen, there is a good chance that we might have to live with unwarranted limitations in list view for many more years.

Thanks to Herman for pointing this out to me. (Since I am an old school Mac user, I don’t often attempt to have two different windows showing the contents of the same folder in list view mode at the same time. When I break the spatial metaphor, it is usually with windows in column view mode, where the sorting issue does not exist. So I hadn’t noticed this particular limitation until now.)

UPDATE: A reader writes to confirm that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) does the same thing, and he also says:

And the explanation is quite simple: the sort order is a property of the folder, not of the window. Consequently, when the sorting is changed in one window it also changes in the other. One could consider the fact that the ordering changes in both windows to be a feature rather than a bug. Certainly, changing the sort order to track with the window rather than the folder would add complexity, which is generally a bad idea.

I am afraid I cannot agree with this. In a non-spatial Finder where the same folder can be viewed simultaneously in several different windows, it makes no sense to attach a single sort order property to the folder. It’s a totally undesirable constraint, and it looks much more like an unwarranted limitation than a feature to me. If Apple decided that each folder had to have a single sort order property, they made a mistake.

The complexity that this reader refers to was added by Apple back in the early 2000s when it decided to break the spatial metaphor in the Finder. Since that metaphor was broken, the complexity of the non-spatial approach is now a fact of a life in Mac OS X’s Finder, and any “feature” that arbitrarily limits the options offered by this increased complexity is likely to frustrate users without really helping keep things more simple.


One Response to “Mac OS X’s Finder: Can’t have two list views sorted differently”

  1. Betalogue » OS X 10.9’s Finder: Wrong text colour in selection highlighting in list view says:

    […] in OS X, which is that list view tends to be treated as a second-class citizen. I’ve written about this in the past, referring to various bugs in OS X’s Finder that are […]