Preserve element ordering between sessions?

[JohnDDuncanIII]

Hello, this might be a dumb question, but is there any way to get the elements to stay ordered between sessions? Here is the default DarkAquaAppearance.car file that I duplicated and opened in two separate ThemeEngine.app windows.

As you can see, the ordering of the various traffic lights differ between the two windows even though they are being grouped by the same value and the files are identical.

As far as I can tell, the ordering of these elements is randomized every time you restart ThemeEngine.app, which makes editing these resources much more difficult.

Thanks for your time!

[ghost]

That's been a thing I've also been curious about for the longest time - this issue goes way back and there isn't a solution as of yet. I suspect it might be somewhere in the enumeration sections of the ThemeEngine code. Now, how to actually sort. What if you group by Scale? Or any of the other grouping - I always do that myself because I find it easier to eliminate the stuff I'm not currently engaged in. You can always sort too - "regular active pressed" and so on. the search is kept through the various elements in the sidebar - some might have all the given search terms while some elements might not have any or just the 'regular' term.

While I get that that's not the answer I still think you can limit the frustration a bit with search terms and grouping by scale or other grouping.

[JohnDDuncanIII]

It looks like the element ordering in https://github.com/insidegui/AssetCatalogTinkerer persists across multiple sessions on Big Sur 11.0.1, which is promising.

Sadly, it is not possible to edit these assets in place, as AssetCatalogTinkerer only lets you export into a folder. If you do export to a folder, the filenames overlap with each other if you try to export all of the WindowFrame traffic lights at once.