On 16 May 2011, at 14:46, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> 
> On May 16, 2011, at 22:06, Jan Anderssen wrote:
> 
>> Hi -
>> 
>> I'm wondering if there is, or could be, a way to sort the main table by 
>> author and year. 
>> 
>> I realize that it is possible to do this by sorting by year first, and then 
>> switching back to sorting by author, but this is not remembered 
>> (understandably, since there's no way of telling what my intention was). 
>> 
>> iTunes has recently solved this problem by introducing a few fixed multiple 
>> sort criteria, I use "Album by Artist/Year" happily. Another, more general, 
>> option might be to explicitly allow multiple sort criteria as e.g. Numbers 
>> and Excel do.
>> 
>> I don't have the skills to contribute myself -- maybe one day I will -- but 
>> in the meantime, maybe I could add this as a request for help (if the 
>> feature exists), or a new feature request (if it doesn't).
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jan
>> 
>> P.S. A note on the recent papers/bibdesk discussion and the shininess factor:
>> 
>> I tried Papers in the beginning, I think partly because of the "shininess" 
>> -- the cute little house construction when it started etc.. But then, in 
>> complete contrast to the clean look, I actually found it pretty messy with 
>> respect to the conceptual underpinning, particularly as witnessed by the 
>> initial complete inability to work with bibtex in any sensible way. 
>> 
>> I am a big fan of BibDesk and I'm not even tempted to give Papers another 
>> try. I'd trade its shiny mess for the well-thoughtout powerhouse with a look 
>> that one may perceiving as slightly more utilitarian any time again. That 
>> being said, I have a few friends who happily use Papers as a simple 
>> interface to access and somewhat catalogue their pdfs, which I assume it 
>> does nicely. So to some extent, I think the user bases of the two programs 
>> may be quite different. 
>> 
>> Anyway, a big Thank You! to all BibDesk contributors.
> 
> I don't see a reasonable way we could do this. 
> 
> One big difference between iTunes and BibDesk is that the content of iTunes 
> is pretty much fixed, while for BibDesk it's very versatile. We cannot set a 
> few fixed sort criteria.
> 
> Apart from that, it would require special UI to be able to set search 
> criteria. For this the general remarks on UI clutter apply. You should 
> realize that one of the reasons BibDesk may be good to work with is precisely 
> because we guard very much for good and intuitive UI without too much clutter 
> (though we did sin against it before we fully realized the problems).
> 
> Though perhaps we could try to remember the secondary criterium. However, it 
> is not too reliable, as it can be lost when you use some e.g. external groups 
> (because that sorts by import order). This is an important reason why we 
> never did save it.
> 
> Christiaan
> 
> 
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This won't apply to everyone, but ...
if you define your citation keys in the form

  authorName:year:whatever

then sorting by Cite Key will do what (I think) you want.

[ Of course this approach has zero flexibility! ;-) ]
[ No way to change your ordering on the fly. Sorry. ]


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