Hey everyone — quick question for the admins/dev team.

In WinSTEP’s Desktop / Apps view (the icon grid), my icons don’t appear to sort the way I’d expect. Instead of reading left-to-right (like A → Z across the row), it looks like the ordering is behaving more like right-to-left, so the alphabetical flow feels “backwards.”

I’m seeing something similar when the dock is minimized and I’m scrolling through apps — it feels like the list starts from the bottom rather than from the top, which also comes across backwards.

Questions:

Is there a setting to force icon sorting to be left-to-right / top-to-bottom (standard A → Z)?

Is the right-to-left behavior expected for certain layouts/languages, or does this sound like a bug?

For the minimized dock scrolling: is there a way to have the list start at the top instead of the bottom?

If this requires an update, what info would you like from me (WinSTEP version/build, Windows version, resolution/DPI scaling, language/region settings, etc.)?

Screenshot attached for reference. Thanks!

Ok, two separate issues here:

1. Some tabs (such as folder tabs AND the Desktop tab) can be sorted by something other than name/alphabetical order (but notice that "special" objects such as the Recycle Bin, My Computer, etc, always appear first).

My guess is that you have your Desktop tab sorted by something other than name. Right click the tab label (the label that says "Desktop") and select Tab Properties. In the Tab Properties dialog, what is Sort By set to?

2. My jaw dropped when I saw that screenshot. The inverted shelf should not look like that *at all*... I'll try to reproduce it here so I can fix it before the official release of v26.1, but in the mean time, what version of Nexus Ultimate are you running (top right corner of the About tab in Preferences)? The latest, v25.9 ?

Thanks Jorge — another update after testing both directions.

I verified the tab is set to Sort by: Name and I tested both Ascending and Descending:

Ascending: items appear to be A→Z, but the grid still looks “backwards” because it seems to start at the top-right and fill right-to-left, instead of starting top-left and filling left-to-right.

Descending (screenshot attached): the ordering still looks off, and I also noticed something that may be related:

Folders/objects are consistently being placed at the bottom of the grid, even while sorting by Name. For example, folder-type items (Documents, Music, etc.) stay grouped on the bottom rows rather than being interleaved alphabetically with the apps. That makes me wonder if the tab is doing a secondary grouping (e.g., “applications first, folders/objects last”) even when Sort by = Name, which might be why the overall result looks incorrect.

So it may be a combination of:

Right-to-left grid fill direction, and/or

Type grouping overriding Name sort (apps vs folders/objects).

I’m still on Nexus Ultimate v25.9. Let me know what additional system info would help you reproduce (Windows version, DPI scaling %, resolution, multi-monitor, region/language).

Ok, I understood what is happening there and it is actually by design. The nearly fully expanded inverted shelf with no way to know if it was docked to a screen edge or not was throwing me off.

Ok, so first, yes, there are actually three groups that are sorted separately, in much the same way Windows Explorer sorts folders and files separately. First group are all the virtual objects like the Recycle Bin, Network, My PC, etc, then it's the folders and finally the files. And before all that you have permanent internal commands specific to that tab type like the "Hide/Show Desktop Icons".

Now, what you are seeing there is the natural result of the shelf expanding down, not up, because it is inverted and either floating or docked to the top screen edge. When the shelf expands downwards, the first row of icons (which show the virtual objects, etc) "follows" the tabs (i.e. the tabs are not "sliding over" icon rows to reveal more icons below the first row, they are "pulling" all the icons below the first row out from the top edge of the shelf), so what ends up happening is that the very last items end up appearing at the very top when you fully expand the shelf. The shelf is inverted, up-side-down, after all..

So, sort order is left to right, bottom to top.

If you dock an *inverted* shelf at the bottom of the screen, the shelf will now expand up (while the tabs stay "anchored" at the bottom) and the top (first) row of icons will follow the top edge of the shelf with further rows of icons "sliding up" under the tabs.

The expansion/scrolling animations would not look right if you did this any other way.

Hope this explains it.

Thanks, Jorge, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this. Your reply honestly pointed me in the right direction and got my brain going, and after a little digging, I was able to get the shelf working the way I expected.

What fixed it for me:

Shelf Properties → Behavior → Miscellaneous Options → More Options
I enabled: “Do not flip icon order when the shelf is docked at the top of the screen.”
That corrected the “reversed” icon order when docked at the top.

Shelf Properties → Appearance → Tab positioning
I set Tab positioning to “Bottom of shelf.”
In my setup (shelf docked at the top/inverted), this keeps the tabs anchored at the top edge of the screen while the shelf expands downward underneath them — exactly what I wanted.

Side note: The “Bottom of shelf” label feels a bit counter-intuitive in this top-docked/inverted scenario (it sounds like the tabs would stay at the bottom), so you might want to consider clarifying the wording later!

Everything’s behaving normally now — thanks again for pointing me in the right direction and getting me going!

I didn't even remember this option existed - and I made this thing! Sorry about that.

I really must bring the User Guide back, and make it up-to-date.

Definitely very much needed and just might reduce help posts a little.