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[Icon View] Default sort order settings not honored (+ no docs + no UI)

Description

I am strongly wedded to reverse-mtime views. While I like the new sort order dropdown in Nautilus 3.30's file browser windows, I cannot seem to make what I choose there stick as the default for all folders, and I don't want to have to do this for the thousands of folders on my computer.

The docs seem to be outdated, and they refer to things in the Preferences window that don't exist any more.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Do the following:
$ killall nautilus && gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.nautilus
$ gsettings list-recursively  org.gnome.nautilus.preferences | grep default-sort
org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-sort-in-reverse-order false
org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-sort-order 'name'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-sort-in-reverse-order true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-sort-order mtime

  1. Launch Nautilus again

  2. Visit a folder you have never visited before with Nautilus 3.30.

  • Observe that the default sort order is by ascending + by name.

  1. Change the sort order in the dropdown (to descending by mtime, in my case).

  2. Kill and restart Nautilus. Browse to that folder again.

  • Observe that the sort order is now what you manually selected.

So the sort order is being stored per folder. However the admin overhead of doing that for all folders I want to use is too great.

  1. Resort to the documentation :) This refers to...

Views preferences in Files
You can change how files and folders are grouped and sorted by default. Select Files ▸ Preferences in the top bar while Files is open and select the Views tab.
Default view
Arrange items
You can change the default sort order that is used in folders using the Arrange items drop-down list in the preferences to sort by name, file size, file type, when they were last modified, when they were last accessed or when they were trashed.
You can change how files are sorted in an individual folder by clicking the view options button in the toolbar and choosing Name, Size, Type or Last Modified, or by clicking the list column headers in list view.
Sort folders before files
By default, the file manager no longer shows all folders before files. To see all folders listed before files, enable this option.

  1. Open Files > Preferences from the app menu

  2. Click on the View tab

  • Observe that there is no drop-down list named "Arrange items".
  • Observe that there is now no way of setting the default sort order on any Preferences tab.

It cannot be done from within the file browse window either: there is no "use this view as the default" option anywhere I can make out.

Versions affected

$ dpkg -l '*nautilus*' | cat
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                              Version      Architecture Description
+++-=================================-============-============-===================================================
ii  gir1.2-nautilus-3.0:amd64         3.30.0-1     amd64        libraries for nautilus components - gir bindings
ii  libnautilus-extension1a:amd64     3.30.0-1     amd64        libraries for nautilus components - runtime version
ii  nautilus                          3.30.0-1     amd64        file manager and graphical shell for GNOME
ii  nautilus-data                     3.30.0-1     all          data files for nautilus
ii  nautilus-extension-brasero        3.12.2-4     amd64        CD/DVD burning integration for Nautilus
ii  nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal 3.28.2-1     amd64        GNOME terminal emulator application
un  nautilus-sendto                   <none>       <none>       (no description available)
ii  python-nautilus                   1.1-6        amd64        Python binding for Nautilus components

Expectations

  • The user should be able to set the default sort order because they can set folder-specific sort orders.
  • The documentation should reflect the software's features correctly.

Observations (summary)

  • The defaults cannot be set in the Preferences window
  • The defaults cannot be set in the file browser windows
  • The old settings for this are not respected
  • The docs are outdated
Edited by António Fernandes
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