bug#60601: 29.0.60; project-find-files reports files in seemingly random order

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

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:
 'configure --with-json --with-tree-sitter
 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/jostein/.opam/default/lib/pkgconfig:'

Configured features:
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TREE_SITTER X11 XDBE XIM XINPUT2 XPM GTK3 ZLIB

Important settings:
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  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nb_NO.UTF-8
  value of $LC_TIME: nb_NO.UTF-8
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Major mode: ELisp/l

Minor modes in effect:
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  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  hs-minor-mode: t

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

Features:
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Memory information:
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--
Kind regards
Jostein Kjønigsen
Software Architect
SuperOffice AS
www.superoffice.com

0001-Make-project-find-files-return-files-in-sorted-order.patch
Description: Text Data