Daan,
At first I thought TP9 followed the policy of Windows which is to sort smart numeric. However, I changed the policy to alphabetic and it does not affect how TP9 sorts files.
File naming is not always under our control and it is nice to be able to sort in the order that is essential for our requirements.
Many applications solve a file name collision by adding the character 1 to the end of the current file name. A1.jpg becomes A11.jpg which becomes A111.jpg, etc. If there is an A2.jpg and A3.jpg, the A1 files will no longer sort together even though they are related.
So, I go through the effort to name my files A00.jpg, A01.jpg, A02.jpg, A99.jpg since I will never have more than 100 files in the series. The editing application takes A10.jpg and adds 1 to make the unique A101.jpg and this file now sorts last, not following A10.jpg. No matter how many digits I add to file names to keep them in sequence, that 1 is going to blow the sequence.
It would be rather nice of Cerious to add options to sort true alphabetic in addition to the smart numeric.
As far as asking for the feature, it seems Helmer did ask and was told smart numeric was the choice of the user base. (Exactly what user base does Cerious listen to?) So, no offer to add back a feature that was present in TP7.
If this is a bug in how "Name" vs "Numeric Name" work then it should be fixed. But with the endless list of persistent bugs in TP9, what are the chances this would get fixed?
Cheers,
Gary