The previous time it came up I suggested to use 'sortgroups' option as a workaround, but it has its limitations.

Providing this as a builtin functionality requires some more analysis. I'm not sure I fully understand how pinned items would relate to sorting. At the moment it sounds like they would just ignore it completely (including reversing of sort order), so it wouldn't be a modification of name sorting key in 'sort' but a modification of processing 'sort' overall (this makes a difference for when you don't sort by name). I guess in tree-view pinned items still respect tree structure but bubble up within corresponding level, and similarly for ls-like view.

Also, items are to be pinned within a specific path, right?

I somehow missed you responded to this request.

Anyway, you're right: in general, sorting would be ignored and the items would be pinned within a specific path.
Since you mentioned it, I could easily see a use case for some files to be pinned across multiple (all and/or specific) directories.

Maybe we could have two kinds of pinning: one within a specific path and the other across all directories.
Also, rules could be defined for the second one in vifmrc.

Thank you for your effort and I appreciate very much how your answers are devoid of any cynicism or such.

Thanks, things are clearer now.

Maybe we could have two kinds of pinning: one within a specific path and the other across all directories.

If path matching for pinning is done via patterns, then there is no distinction because patterns can match either file names or paths. However, that might be too much for pinning where something more specialized could suffice.

Also, rules could be defined for the second one in vifmrc.

If there is some kind of :pin command, it might as well do any kind of pinning regardless of the used syntax.

Order of pinned files can probably match relative order of corresponding patterns/paths so that reordering them would result in different file order.

Something like, for example: :pin hard would never change its place, :pin soft would be influenced by sorting etc. In general, :pin hard would be more important, and more than one pinned hard file would be like LIFO stack.
Command could be mapped as [...]map [...] :pin hard %c.

Only thing which could be more thought about are default keybindings for both hard and soft pinning
(if they are needed at all, or mnemonically inuitive).

:pin soft would be influenced by sorting etc.

In other words, not pinned? Is that supposed to unpin things?

:pin hard would be unmovable, not influenced by sort etc., but :pin soft would be movable (meaning effected by sort). Of course, :unpin would unpin files.

:pin soft would be movable (meaning effected by sort).

If the purpose of pinning is for entries to not be affected by sorting, then how come this is pinning?

If the purpose of pinning is for entries to not be affected by sorting, then how come this is pinning?

I'm proposing a specific kind of pinning, something like: move-to-the-top-and-then-pin-it-there.
Pinning by itself is not very useful, if the file pinned is, for example, 103rd...

If :pin hard is used, file would be not effected by sorting, basically ignored.
When some sorted option is used, :pin soft-ed files could be sorted between themselves at the top — stay at the top, but be effected by sorting.

In structure, this would be actually three separate lists maintained as one list: two pinned lists at the top, and the rest of the files which would have the first two filtered out. (We could work out the details how hard and soft list would be between themselves.)

Maybe we could, for the moment, only implement :pin hard, which would be LIFO-stack-like list.
A file would always be in the same position at the top, but if some other file is :pin-ed hard , it would go down the list. And if the same file is again pinned, it would go to the absolute top of the (:pin-ed hard) list.

This could all seem like a over-engineering, but it's actually very ordinary:
think about pin board, some things we don't move, but some other we sort or impose some kind of structure on them.

And, in the end, maybe we should not call this specific kind of option pinning.

Since we have something like this in forums (sticky posts/threads), name could be :stick hard/soft.

(I just noticed...) In the post above, pun not intended. Having that in mind, pin is a better name.

@xaizek Have you started on a prototype and/or made some kind of progress to implement this?

Have you started on a prototype and/or made some kind of progress to implement this?

No, don't expect it in the next release. It's already rather late and I still have long list of things to do for it.