Subject: 29.0.60; project-find-files reports files in seemingly random order

From: Jostein Kjønigsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2023 10:48:56 +0100

When working in large projects, and using completion engines like Helm, 
one often navigates within an Emacs-project by first typing some 
preliminary filtering-criteria, observing the result, and then further 
limiting the results until one eventually finds the one file you want to 
work with.

For this flow to work well, one needs to have related files show up 
close to one another, and not being listed in "random" order.

However, in some projects I've observed that generated files (not part 
of VC) are shown on top, and VC-files comes later.

When the generated files are supposed to be alongside the checked in 
files, this makes navigation using project-find-file hard, because of 
the low data-locality in the presented results.

Example:

- src/someFile.d.ts   # compiled files
- src/someFile.js
- tests/someTest.d.ts
- tests/someTest.js
- src/someFile.ts     # vc-files
- tests/someTest.ts

If the results are sorted, the proper files are much easier to find quickly:

- src/someFile.d.ts
- src/someFile.js
- src/someFile.ts
- tests/someTest.d.ts
- tests/someTest.js
- tests/someTest.ts

Are there any reason we're currently not doing that?

If we can agree sorting the result is a proper thing to do, attached is 
a patch which implements this change.

--
Jostein

In GNU Emacs 29.0.60 (build 13, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version

  3.24.33, cairo version 1.16.0) of 2023-01-06 built on dev-jostein
Repository revision: 699711786ac7aa6d6524467076a45568e283e061
Repository branch: emacs-29
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12201001
System Description: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS

Configured using:
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Load-path shadows:
/home/jostein/.emacs.d/elpa/transient-20221202.1727/transient hides 
/home/jostein/build/emacs/lisp/transient

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Memory information:
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-- 
Kind regards
*Jostein Kjønigsen*
Software Architect
SuperOffice AS
www.superoffice.com <https://www.superoffice.com>

From 6df088f98e7c4e7cd3c00919a5534fd315d2cde1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Jostein=20Kj=C3=B8nigsen?= <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2023 10:33:51 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Make project-find-files return files in sorted order.

---
 lisp/progmodes/project.el | 10 +++++-----
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lisp/progmodes/project.el b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
index 730998727ce..03119b16ce7 100644
--- a/lisp/progmodes/project.el
+++ b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
@@ -1080,11 +1080,11 @@ project-find-file-in
                              (concat dir "/"))
                            vc-directory-exclusion-list))
          (all-files
-          (if include-all
-              (mapcan
-               (lambda (dir) (project--files-in-directory dir vc-dirs-ignores))
-               dirs)
-            (project-files project dirs)))
+          (sort (if include-all
+                    (mapcan
+                     (lambda (dir) (project--files-in-directory dir vc-dirs-ignores))
+                     dirs)
+                  (project-files project dirs)) #'string<))
          (completion-ignore-case read-file-name-completion-ignore-case)
          (file (funcall project-read-file-name-function
                         "Find file" all-files nil 'file-name-history
-- 
2.34.1