Numerical sorting of registry keys off

[pjj]

Not very important issue, but still would be nice to switch off numerical sorting of registry keys, regardless of value for this option in general settings. Rationale for this feature request is simple: hardly anybody (that's my guess, I must admit ) while searching for keys like e.g. {9381D8F6-0288-11D0-9501-00AA00B911A5} pays attention to its numerical value.

With numerical sorting next (with regard to the one displayed above) key in my registry is, surprisingly, {00020430-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}; without -- {93BB06B6-B6DA-43C8-BC9B-E32DB49AA6F7}, which seems more, umm, predictable (938..., 93B... instead of 938..., 000).

[zarevak]

I've encouterred similar issue with GUID-named folders and reported it in the Czech part of the forum: Numerické řazení a GUID názvy složek

My proposed solution was to automatically detect GUID-style names and disable numeric sorting on such folders and files. Sadly this solution is not enought, because I've already seen another folder, which contained files having the name equal to hexadecimal representation of SHA1 hash of the data contained in the file (eg. 76CD0D8DA29F39D910F5A52227F13A41C8F911E3 )

How to solve this issue more generally? How can the program decide, what is the expected output user wants to see?

[pjj]

My proposed solution was to automatically detect GUID-style names and disable numeric sorting on such folders and files. (...) How to solve this issue more generally? How can the program decide, what is the expected output user wants to see?

Perhaps program could just make an educated guess (based on some criteria, like curly braces around names) and it'd be the user to decide if this directory should be sorted w/o numerical sorting or not (if numerical sorting is set at all in his/her options). Names of these directories should be cached. -- Another question is if it isn't going a little bit overboard. I found two directories on my disk with names like these (windows/installer and /Mozilla/profile/extensions) and I browse them even more rarely than my registry, which I browse very rarely. So perhaps limiting this feature to registry (and maybe some number of predefined directories) would be enough?