Sublime Forum

Sidebar: arbitrary ordering of files in a folder

#1

I’d like to be able to reorder the files within a folder (as displayed in the sidebar) using the mouse, rather than having them always ordered alphabetically.

This would go a long way to making ST a better replacement for Scrivener. (Fixing a few natural language text bugs, such as punctuation wrap and proportional font support, would do most of the rest.)

The use case for this is writing a large document in Markdown. Each section of the document is a separate Markdown file, organized hierarchically in folders.

Reordering sections in a document is a very common operation when writing text.

This would require listing the files in the project file, in the user’s desired order.

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#2

Sublime Text lets you use proportional fonts.

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#3

I absolutely support finding a way to arbitrarily order files and even folders within a project. Actually searching for a solution for just that brought me to this thread, so +1 it is.

And yeah, proportional font support is already there (and ST’s renderer makes it the most beautiful editor in the world as far as how the text looks on screen), though yeah, wrapping punctuation is kinda lame, for a content editor, even though that is accepted behavior for a code editor, I’m afraid. Always wanted to suggest that Jon maybe strip a version of ST down for just what writers would use, you know to cut down on the price and the distraction of being able to figure out how to do almost any insignificant little thing to the interface that might fly into your head when you should be writing, but then I think of the overhead of having to support a small, loud, though mostly non-overlapping new audience for the app, and the fact that I like ST just fine the way it is (distractions be damned) ;-p

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#4

Good post … I have been researching editing and publication tools for markdown based ebooks. I will look into scrivener, but so far, most markdown editors produce one pdf per .md file, not for a directory of files - do you know of any.

And yes, ST2 is fast, and easy for Markdown editing, but I dont really use any plugins, etc.

Well I just name the files 00 Frontmatter.md, 01 Chapter 1 xyz.md, 02 Chapter 2.md, etc.

I find this ordering helps me mentally organize thoughts in writing markdown ebooks.

Then on windows I do a “dir /b/A-d/On >> fileslist” to get a list, that I feed to a ebook generator to get .pdf, .mobi, .epub, .epub3, etc. files from markdown and pandoc.

There is a manual step in connecting the list of files to proper Chapter titles, but am working on script tool for extracting first line of each markdown file.

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