Display order of tags - confusing results

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

Hi all,

I’m working with a fairly simple set of tags: Today, Hot, 1, 2. (They are in that order in the Tags list.) Some items have two tags (one being the Today tag).

I’ve created a Perspective for just these tags. I’m grouping individual items by Tag. I assumed that when sorting by Tags Order, items with Today only would be first, then Today, 1 and Today, 2, in the tags order. Like this:

  • Today
  • Today, 1
  • Today, 2

But instead, the display order is random and jumbled. In the Today group, items with only Today tags are down in the list, and when other tags are displayed first, they’re not in any order. I’m attaching screencaps.

When I change the sorting to just Tag, the display rearranges, but still not in any order. (See screencaps.)

If I have my tags specifically ordered in the Tags view (in screencaps), why is this order not respected when sorting by Tags Order? Or by Tag? And how can I fix this?

Can someone advise?

I’d love to solve this. I’m keeping my tags simple so I can have clearly sorted Perspectives, but with even these few tags being jumbled, OmniFocus is removing focus and adding distraction.

Thanks for any help!
Brett

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#2

There are two cases here. A sort by ‘Tags Order’ means the order of items you chose under the tag corresponding to the group. Remember that you can manually rearrange items inside a specific tag in the Tags perspective.

When you sort items by ‘Tag’ in a custom perspective, the sort order doesn’t follow the order of tags in the hierarchy, unfortunately. It performs a character-based sort using the full path of the tag in the hierarchy. In your example, the tags are in the order of appearance of the emoji in the whole emoji set. If you didn’t have emoji, you’d find that ‘Hot’ would be sorted before ‘Today’, regardless of the tag hierarchy, because of the alphanumeric order.

This is a long-standing behaviour in the app. I get around it by adding underscore prefixes on some of my tags to get the order I want. It’s a bit frustrating because it’s inelegant but I’ve come to live with it! I wrote about this in this thread: Perspective for several most important tags

#3

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#4

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