User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C) Steps to reproduce: Hello. I have 1000+ message filters. Actual results: It sure would be helpful, I could click on the column heading, to sort the list alphabetically, rather than having to mannually search through all 1000 filters, to find the one I want to edit. Expected results: Surprised this was not suggested or thought of earlier.

jersmith, would bug 450302 be a better solution/do more for you? Or, do you really want an alpha sort?

Wayne hi. A filter search capability would be ok (versus alpha sort), just so long as it can search for partial words, i.e., do not force me to input the full exact spelling of the filter name, in order to locate and edit it. Allow me instead to input just the first few characters, in order to bring up all matches. If this is not clear please ask me again to clarify. Thanks.

Wayne, hi again. I just installed the add-on "Filter of Filters." This definitely helps, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem. I have over a thousand of filters, adding new ones daily. I have so many, that I've forgotten many of them. Only by being able to sort them, in a list, in some kind of order, do you really have the chance to do meaningful editing of such a large collection of filters. So I have to correct myself from my previous message, and say that an alpha-sort is probably the best solution here.

Sorting filters would be a very bad move. Filters are order-dependent (at least in theory), so sorting them could easily break things. It's theoretically possible to determine if order matters for a set of filters, but I think that would be a lot more effort than it's worth.

A user won't particularly care that we currently display a filter list in it's "physical order". Or that physical order matters in some cases, although when you get into extreme cases like this, it's unclear to me that the user is likely to have 'tiers' of filters where order would in fact matter. That said, I don't think we fully understand jersmith's usecase. Can you run us through 2-3 scenarios, step by step.

hi all.. i just want to sort the list alphabetically. if you have 50 filters that begin with the letter A, you might forget the names of some of them. by grouping them together, you can see what you have, without having to scroll through 1000 individual filters.

If bug 450302 were regexp based, where one could specify ^ as start of string, it could potentially solve your need

in any event, this is a duplicate