Feature request: Reorder shopping list items manually to custom it as your needs.

[edersong]

What's the feature 🧐

The possibility to reorder shopping list manually positioning things where we want I explain: I use to use bring! also, but it's a pain to use because we cannot reorder items and I would like to it manually to make my shopping list ordered by the supermarket aisles to avoid going and back ticking items. The ideal is to maintain it already ordered to the next go to market.

Extra information and references

No response

[TomBursch]

I know that some people have said they would like to have a custom order. There are just a few questions I have about that.

• Should this ordering be permanent and stored? I.e. you order Milk in front of Apples, next time you add both should Milk still be in front? If yes, then there a many other questions I have, like what about new items, where should they be added. What if I also have put orange juice put in front of apples, should that then be in front of Milk or after? What if you want to reset the custom ordering? Should you be able to just reset all?
• How is this beneficial over categories (which you can already order however you like). I personally created a category for every section of the store and then ordered the categories exactly how I go through all sections.
• In an ideal world the algorithmic sorting should exactly match what you would order them by hand. Maybe a better solution would be to let users give the algorithmic sorting some hints (but then we have the same questions as in point 1)

I generally feel like custom ordering for items will just be annoying to use/manage. But feel free to change my mind :)

[edersong]

Hi Tom, My use case is to have items ordered the same by supermarket's items positioned in order to have a single way on it avoiding go and back or zig zags. Categories will not help because the products are not always distributed on the shelves according to their category and there are long aisles where the products are of the same category, but it is unlikely that the first product at the beginning of the aisle will coincide with the first in the category and the same will apply to the last. I think that algorithmic sorting will never understand as it works in fact, because I will mark items to buy in a certain order at home and will check them out at the supermarket in a different order always. I hope that my explanation is clear and be considered. ;-) Thank you in advance.

[irishrain]

I'm one of the people who want(ed) custom ordering - and then the store I usually go to closed. Now I'm happy to have used categories, as they are similar enough between stores that I don't have to reorder everything.

However I also want to propose how a custom ordering could be implemented (answering Toms questions on the way): Use lexorank (as in Jira) to store order permanently. My workflow would be to first add all items that I need to the shopping list, and then just before going to the shop I would sort the list. Assuming there are just a few new items every time, you could just add them at the top so I see them right away or even have them in a separate 'new items' section. The question from your example about orange juice in front of milk or after would be answered by lexorank - if the answer is wrong I would notice next time I go shopping, and could easily correct it. Resetting the ordering is not something I would want - whatever way you reset it, the effort for a complete reorder should be similar no matter how you start.

To solve my "the store closed and now I go to different stores that have different ordering" problem, you could even have a custom list of stores and a custom ordering for each of them. Before I found KitchenOwl I used a generic list app, writing and ordering the list fresh every week. And when (inevitably) the store I went to did not have 10 of the items I needed reordering the remaining items before going to a second store to get the missing things.

[KitoschK]

This is labelled wontfix, I know, but I'd still like to chime in. Actually, this is to me one of the most important functions of a shopping list. As others have explained before, I want to avoid zigzagging through the aisles, at least in my standard go-to supermarket. I measured it saves me over 50% of time (compared to a fully random list) when I have things ordered the way I walk by them.

As to your question about where to sort new items, couldn't you prompt the user to define its place when it's added for the very first time?