Regarding your second point, that's not really what a graphical file manager is for, I think. At this point (likely even earlier) you would be better off just writing a simple script in the scripting language of your choice. (If going for something fancy, you could also implement a FUSE based on symlinks for the original files, where the filename is prepended by a sort key. This would work for every major file manager and you could manipulate the files in mostly the same way as before.)