I'm using Fedora Cinnamon 42 and my file explorer is Nemo. I'm trying to organize a huge movie collection, but I've been really frustrated with how titles starting with "The" get sorted together. For example, titles like "The Abyss" and "The Batman" all end up grouped, which makes it really hard to browse through my collection. Is there a way to make Nemo ignore words like "The" when sorting file names?
4 Answers
If you're up for some scripting, you can use a Python script to sort your files while ignoring certain leading words like "The," "A," or "An." I can share a snippet that lists all files in your directory and sorts them accordingly. Just customize the list of ignore words in the script, and you're good to go!
I don’t think any file manager does this by default, but I've seen lots of requests for this feature in other file managers like Dolphin and Nautilus. A workaround you could try is to rename your files using a common naming convention—like moving "The" to the end of the title. For instance, you could rename "The Abyss" to "Abyss, The." It won't be perfect, but it might help with sorting!
Nemo is open source, so if you're really keen on this feature, you could suggest it as a feature request or even try to implement it yourself! It could be beneficial for a lot of users who deal with similar issues.
The script shared by techSavvyTom works perfectly! You could even create an alias for it, like `titlesort`, to make it quicker to run. While it’s not a GUI solution, it's definitely a good workaround until someone adds this feature to Nemo!
Yeah, I've been doing that for my collection too. Makes it way easier to find stuff!