See discussions here [http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/456] and here [https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/66307/sort-arrows-reversed-between-macos-and-linux/p1]. Essentially: triangle facing up (^) has become the pseudo-universal standard for ascending order i.e. 1,2,3. Triangle facing down (V) descending order, largest first, 3,2,1. This is true in windows & apple OSs, online various (wikipedia etc). Per the first link there's not necessarily any winning rationale for this, though there are some posited here [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/338166/which-direction-should-the-arrows-point-in-a-sorted-table], especially 'wide base = biggest value, narrow point = smallest value'. Regardless of winning justification, the key point is UX is worsened by breaking from convention for no apparent reason. Thus: please can Thunar reverse the direction of the triangle/arrows used to signify sort order for columns? Thanks
There's an upstream issue on the matter: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305277 I don't have any strong feelings about this, I never payed attention to that arrow, I just click until I get the right sorting direction. Even if it's possible to invert the arrow in Thunar, we would need to change this for every other Xfce component that uses GtkTreeView. You can append gtk-alternative-sort-arrows = true to ~/.config/gtk-2.0/settings.ini (Thunar 1.6.x) or ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini (current master) so every GTK application will have the desired arrow direction. Closing because this is a GTK preference, changing this in Xfce would lead to a even more inconsistent behavior while using non-Xfce apps.