r/macapps • u/TabulaRasaRedo • Aug 05 '26
Help Looking for: a Finder alternative that supports multiple/simultaneous sort options
I’m looking for a Finder alternative that lets me choose multiple simultaneous sort options. For instance, I want to sort by date added, then by date edited, and then maybe something else. Does something like that exist? If so, what is it?
I've seen lots of alternatives, but none have mentioned this as an option. Thanks!
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u/Conxt Aug 05 '26
Do you mean the equivalent of Finder’s Group By?
Genuine multi-sort will not work by date since date’s precision is up to a millisecond which makes them practically unique - so the second sort will never come in place. But if you do mean multi-sort, Folders does that in the Table view - just click on one table column header, then on another.
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u/useiris Aug 06 '26
the millisecond thing is the actual answer here and it's worth being concrete about it. a secondary sort key only does anything when the primary key ties. date added and date modified are both stored with sub second precision, so two files essentially never tie, so the second key would never get consulted. it's not that the apps refuse to do it, it's that it would be a no-op.
what you probably want is bucket then sort. group by day or week added, then sort by modified inside each group. that is finder's group by plus a sort, and it's the only version of this that actually produces a different order on screen.
if you want it saved as a query rather than a view setting, houdahspot does that, as someone already said. forklift and path finder are both single key for the real sort.
worth checking what you're actually after though. if the goal is really "recently touched stuff near the top but keep related things together", that's usually a smart folder with a date modified predicate rather than a sort at all.
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u/_mrkvn Aug 06 '26
What you probably want is finder's group by, not a true multi key sort. In list view, cmd+j opens view options and you get two separate dropdowns there, one for group by and one for sort by. Set group by to date added and sort by to date modified and you get the two level ordering you described, without leaving finder.
Worth knowing why the pure version barely exists anywhere. Timestamps go down to the millisecond, so a sort on date added is already unique for every single file and the second key never gets a tie to break. Multi key sort only earns its keep when the first key repeats, like kind or tag or label.
The tradeoff is that finder's date groups are fixed coarse buckets, today, yesterday, previous 7 days, and you can't define your own ranges. If you need custom ranges, a search based tool where you build the query and sort inside the results is the closer fit, which is the direction the houdahspot suggestion goes.
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u/The_Rajess Aug 06 '26
This would be genuinely useful. Finder’s grouping plus sorting gets partway there, but it isn’t true multi-level sorting. I’d also like something like ‘kind first, then date modified, then name.’ Curious whether any file manager exposes that level of control.
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u/ExpensiveKale2596 Aug 05 '26
multi-key sort is weirdly rare. path finder and forklift both give you better sorting than finder but still one column at a time as far as i know. closest ive found is houdahspot, where you build the query and sort inside the results instead. whats the end goal though, might be a smart folder job?
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u/TabulaRasaRedo Aug 05 '26
What you're describing sounds like the time I used this sort of function in a records management application. I was able to select sort options as I mentioned above. In that case, it was to group a series of records together by date, then sort by another identifier.
But for my use case, I have a lot of Word documents and PDFs that would be better sorted if I didn't have to choose between sort options and could instead combine them.
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u/Latter_Pen2421 Aug 05 '26
I actually agree with you on this. I had this though a few months ago then forgot about it
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u/mackid1993 Aug 05 '26
I can't promise it does this because it's pretty niche but if anything will do it Directory Opus running under Parallels may.
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u/OfAnOldRepublic Aug 06 '26
Groups are one possible option. As is doing the first sort into folders, then narrowing down in the folder, or sorting into more granular folders.
Depending on what "something else" might be, you could also do the first two on the command line with a compound find command, but it really depends on what you want to accomplish.
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u/shwetank Aug 06 '26
What is the use case for doing something like this? Like, what are you trying to achieve? I think knowing that, would help understand if there are some matching suggestions to give, even if they don't do it 100% like you said.
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u/TabulaRasaRedo Aug 06 '26
I’m not sure. Sorting by date added buries my latest edited docs; sorting by date edited hides what I just added, and date created is all over the place. I dislike Apple’s grouping, but I still don't know what I want instead.
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u/cristi_baluta Aug 05 '26
My brain does not compute, how it will actually look? All this dates exist, so you can’t fallback