It takes six mouse clicks to change the sorting order of my notes from alphabetical + ascending to last edited + descending (or vice versa). It becomes more and more irritating, so I want to propose a one-click solution:
You see four buttons on top of the lists of notebooks/notes. The first three are a set of radio buttons, the fourth is a toggle for ascending/descending. Maybe they should be highlighted to indicate the current state, but I don’t care so much.
Doesn’t this setup require two mouse clicks? Not necessarily. I think there are two ways to facilitate one-click control:
Replace the notions ascending/descending with customary/contrary. Alphabetical sort is usually ascending, and time sort is usually descending (in the context of a picklist of objects in an app).
Let Joplin remember the ascending/descending status for all three sorting attributes separately.
In most cases, I would only need to click the [A] or the [✐] to switch the order of my notes.
There are other ways to make sorting more convenient. For instance by predefined hotkeys, or user-definable hotkeys in combination with some kind of macro facility. These alternatives would make me evenly happy.
I think that would be a useful feature but also eventually we’d like to have multiple columns in the note list, so in that case sorting will be done by clicking on the headers.
While I see the need for a lean user experience, I’m a little bit worried because I do love the simple and buttonless UI.
As you are not changing the sort order all the time Probably an idea could be to have a little button for sorting and this opens a menu with the proposed options.
Just an idea.
Also we should think about the context, would we need/expect two different sorting orders in the sidebar and the note list or could or should they apply to both …
FWIW, I would recommend a different approach to the OP: "Toggle sort order field" and "Reverse sort order" are both commands that you can set arbitrary keyboard shortcuts to - if you define shortcuts that make sense to you, you won't need complex clicking sequences anymore. (and while the keyboard sequence may still be "complex", complex keyboard sequences are generally much easier/faster to apply).
... which then would take a lot of screen space in the standard layout, in particular if one likes to keep Joplin in a smaller window (say 25% of screen space), with the notes "column" as wide as 15 chars.
