Your comments

Okay, in your reading cross that one off the list.

I assume the rest of my points are worthy of valid consideration in your opinion?

No I am not assuming anything of the kind.

For all the very good reasons you give renaming is very often far worse than just putting up with things as they are.

We are in furious agreement on everything you said.

But the next time we are designing a new scheme let's not make the same old mistakes like failing to pad numbers in file names. Let's make new and more interesting mistakes.

1 - 'Normal' sorting. Well yes I agree there is no more meaning to 'normal' than to 'natural' in terms of sorting. But that's not what I said. Read carefully to get full meaning. The phrase being used is 'normal string' sorting. So I am referring not to 'normal' but to 'normal string'. Does taking the words I am using in context make my point clearer? Do you agree that there is a clear and well understood set of rules that have been in place for decades on how strings are to be sorted? They may be crude and brutal and arbitrary and even annoying but we all know what they are without thinking about it very much. There are no real surprises there and the fewer surprises my computer presents me with the happier I am.

2 - I wonder what you think 'natural number sorting' is and is not. What is natural for you might be natural for me but not for someone else. What about RTL languages, what about, what about. I am happy to stick with the well understood behaviour of how string sorting works to avoid any clashes with whatever each person might consider 'natural' and 'unnatural' (whatever those terms mean). String sorting may well be arbitrary and annoying and all those sorts of things but a simple, clear and deterministic set of well understood rules is my preference over getting 'cute' with more 'clever' schemes. 

3 - "Can you come up with a scenario where natural number sorting would result in sublime sorting incorrectly, but lexicographical sorting would not?" Yep here are two very obvious cases:

    1 : any case where what you think is 'natural' i think is 'unnatural'

    2 : any case where the attempt to apply one or more 'clever' 'natural' sorting algorithms has an implementation bug - I have huge respect for Jon but he is human and is therefore capable of coding a bug.

Neither of these cases apply if we just accept the arbitrary constraint of using the raw string sorting of the base language. And as a bonus we don't cruft up the ST code with junk.

Anyway I think we have both made our positions clear and I certainly think yours is a position worthy of respect. I don't think it is stupid or anything like that. It is just that I strongly disagree and hope very much it is not implemented.

Ah ha, what a nifty idea.

A minimap of the file IS the tab / link to that file.

Not at all what I thought you were describing.

I kinda imagine this would be more difficult to do cross-paltform than OS X specific.

For me I don't think it fits with ST's minimalist design aesthetic but I can see the attraction.

So now I left click on the file and i get the file in my tab with the minimap showing me the structure of this file.

If it looks like the file I want to work on I can start making changes and it becomes the active file.

What does your idea give that is not in that process? Or is easier in your idea than that process gives?

At the moment it seems like everything you want it provided by the minimap. (Maybe not in the exact way you are used to but there nonetheless.)

What am I missing?

Are you talking about some kind of amalgamation of multiple files into a single view? (based on includes or calls or something)

Maybe if you gave some concrete exempts of how Coda does whatever it is you want to see ST do it might help?

How would this be superior to left clicking the file in the sidebar to get the file in context and using 'Save As' to create a duplicate?

Not saying your idea is bad. Just giving you the chance to expand on it to 'sell' the idea to the community so we can see what new and added value it adds over what we have. There are so many good ideas in here that getting up votes is hard unless you make it obvious why your idea deserves them.

So maybe something like zooming way out on the code?

(Command - on OS X | Control and mouse wheel on Windows)

Something of that kind?

If it is kinda like the minimap then how is your suggestion better than the minimap? 

I am not poking holes in your suggestion, just trying to get your idea out more explicitly and give you the chance to 'sell' it and why it would be a cool feature to have.

Could well be that you gave all these reasons in the stuff that got lost but unless the community can see your brilliant thoughts it is going to be hard to get up votes amongst all the other brilliant ideas already in here.

Could you please expand on what you are asking for here.

What does a 'preview' mean in the context you are using it?

Are you asking for a rendering of your HTML?

Or something else?

I really have no good idea of what you are trying to describe.

I am not sure it is ST's role to compensate for poor file naming decisions.

I would far rather that ST maintains normal string comparison behaviour than try to get clever and put things were I don't expect them. One glitch or hard to understand sorting decision in sorting file names would be far worse for me than maintaining current behaviour which is logical and easily comprehensible even it sometimes exposes annoyances when it highlights poor naming decisions by humans or tools.

Padding file names containing numbers with zeros to allow correct string comparisons is the cross-platform, cross-tool, universal solution here. 

If one of your human colleagues doesn't understand how string comparisons work here is a chance for them to learn a valuable lesson that will pay them back many times over.

If some tool is automatically naming files in a pattern that prevents correct string comparisons then I think the problem lies with that tool rather than with ST.

Has anyone tried their large file searching tasks side by side in ST2 and ST3?

Does the speed-up in ST3 make this item able to be treated as addressed?

Or are their remaining problems?

Any news on how things are going in this space would be of interest to a lot of people if anyone has news to share.