Can entries in the Asset Library menu be sorted? Or searched?

Question

I love Blender's built-in Asset-Browser, but as I add more assets I'm realizing that there doesn't appear to be way to sort entries in the Assets Library menu. And unfortunately, with every new instance of Blender the entries appear to be in a different order. It would be so much easier to find the library I need if these entries could be sorted alphabetically, or at least searched; is there a way to do either? Thanks. Blender 3.3.1, Windows 11

Answer 1

Asset Library entries are displayed in the order you entered them in your file paths preferences.

I think the reason you see them sometimes ordered differently, is because when you click on an enum property field, the items are sorted in reversed order depending on if the popup opened towards the top of the screen or toward the bottom of the screen.

I implemented a solution to sort the library names using python in my asset batch-operations addon.

Run this script in the text editor, it will sort your asset libraries alphabetically. You may want to backup your preferences somehow because if something goes wrong you might have mangled asset library names (it won't affect your files, just the name of the asset libraries).

import bpy


asset_libraries = bpy.context.preferences.filepaths.asset_libraries
asset_libraries_sorted = asset_libraries[:]
asset_libraries_sorted.sort(key=lambda al: al.name)
names = [a_l.name for a_l in asset_libraries_sorted]
paths = [a_l.path for a_l in asset_libraries_sorted]

for asset_library in asset_libraries:
    asset_library.name += "__temporary__"  # Two libs can't share the same name

for i, (name, path) in enumerate(zip(names, paths)):
    asset_libraries[i].name = name
    asset_libraries[i].path = path

How it works : Since you can't actually reorder the asset libraries in your preferences, the script makes a double ledger copy of the asset library names and their path to disk, sorts them, then overwrites each entry accordingly.