@FeRDNYC: Sorry, I've misread your previous post.

So would showing a Mime type registered in Windows for that specific file extension be helpful? The Mime type starts with the "coarse categorization" (like image/). So sorting by that, you will get all documents of the "coarse category" grouped together.

@martin: Right, but like I said, that can be a subtly different thing.

It's tricky because Windows types tend to be so detailed/specific, which ironically makes the column less useful for things like sorting.

GNOME Nautilus actually offers two separate type columns, "Type" and "Detailed Type":

• The "Detailed Type" is the MIME type description, similar to Windows' filetyping.
  
• The "Type" column is just a very coarse categorization -- Video, Document, Image, etc.
  

The second one (the coarse type) is the one that often comes in really handy for sorting.

By sorting by coarse "Type", you can (for example) quickly group all of a directory's video files together, separating them out from any surrounding files in non-video formats. Because they're all listed as "Video" in the "Type" column, it totally doesn't matter whether every file is the same format with the same extension, or they're a complete jumble of different containers/extensions.

@FeRDNYC: WinSCP can sort the file panel by extensions.

Sorting by file type comes to mind, offhand. Which is often useful for selecting all files of a certain type, because it groups them together.

Yes, you can use the option to select all files with a certain extension, but that may be a subtly different thing. Consider, for example, a directory containing both .jpg and .jpeg files.

(Then again, on my Win10 system those are shown with the type "JPG File" and "JPEG File", respectively, because I guess I haven't installed any software that sets descriptive names for those types. Though in theory, if I had, they'd both presumably be "Joint Photographic Experts Group File"s. But that's also partly the point – it's not like WinSCP controls those names. They're defined at the Windows level by applications that support a particular file type. The name can also be edited in the Registry, for the really determined.)

Useful for what specifically?

Thanks for the reply. The column is sometimes useful, but the long file type names is sort of overdoing the "usefulness", so I was looking for a way to simplify the display. Maybe a miracle will happen.

If you do not need the Type column, just hide it:
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_file_panel#selecting_columns

The extension itself is already in the Name column.

WinSCP shows the full file type for all files which takes up vast amounts of screen space, e.g: instead of: Type= "jpg file", WinSCP displays: type= "Joint Photographic Experts File" which takes up a huge amount of screen space I could use to display other parameters. Just "jpg file" is all I need to see.