On Mar 16, 2016, at 9:08 AM, Perry Smith <pedzsan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I’ve seen one application where each click cycles through “sort up”, “sort down”, and “sort off” (but I can’t recall where). Wireshark already has “sort up” and “sort down” and cycles back to “sort up”.
Where did you see the behavior you describe? What application, and what OS/GUI (Windows, OS X, GNOME, KDE, etc.)? I see the same behavior as Wireshark in OS X's Mail application, for example.
> The other thought is the menu that right click pops up, turn off sort could be there but that doesn’t seem like a good design.
Well, at least in OS X's Mail, control+click/right click on a column heading pops up a menu that includes a "Sort By" menu that offers a set of fields and a section with "Ascending" and "Descending" - it could offer "None" in the set of fields (it doesn't, but it could).
I guess if you have a set of data that doesn't have a "natural" sort order, it's not clear what "None" would do; OS X Mail doesn't use mbox format, it uses a flavor of maildir (each message in a separate file), so "in the order the messages appear in the mailbox" isn't available as a "natural" sort order, but in Wireshark there's a single file and "in the order they appear in the file", which is equivalent to "ascending by frame number", is the "natural" sort order.
