A new PC utility called 3DSort has arrived to turn the chaotic home screen of a hacked Nintendo 3DS into something you might actually want to look at, giving users a proper 3DS home screen organiser that runs on their computer and writes changes directly to the SD card.
What the 3DS Home Screen Organiser Actually Does
If you have been running custom firmware on your 3DS for any length of time, you will know the feeling. The home screen fills up. Folders multiply. Half the tiles are applications you installed during a late-night homebrew session and have not opened since. The 3DS was never designed to manage dozens of installed titles gracefully, and the stylus-driven UI starts to feel it.
3DSort, created by SalustLab, tackles that problem from the PC side. You pull your SD card, plug it into your computer, and the application lets you drag and drop tiles around a live preview that reproduces the console screen exactly, for every view setting from 1×60 to 6×10. You can swap any two tiles by dropping one onto the other, whether they are games, system apps, folder tiles or even the Game Card slot. Moving games in and out of folders, creating new ones, renaming them, emptying them or deleting them entirely are all handled through the same desktop interface.
Sort presets are included for those who want a quick result rather than manual arrangement: alphabetical A to Z or Z to A, and by release date with oldest or newest first. Every change is staged in memory before anything is written, so you have full undo, redo and reset available. Nothing touches the card until you hit WRITE and confirm the action.
Safety is built into the workflow as well. A backup of the current layout is taken automatically before every write, and any of those backups can be restored later. Each write also unwraps gift-boxed icons in bulk and preserves the HOME menu theme you set on the console, even when restoring an older backup.
How 3DSort Reaches Into the NAND
The technical approach here is worth understanding before you dive in. The HOME menu layout lives in an encrypted extdata archive on the SD card. 3DSort uses a tool called save3ds to extract and reimport that archive using your console’s own keys, then parses the save data itself. Anything in the file it does not recognise is preserved byte for byte, which matters when you are dealing with a system that was never meant to be edited this way.
Icons and names are pulled from the console’s own icon cache, so the grid in the desktop app shows exactly what the console shows. Folder definitions and system app positions live in a file called Launcher.dat, inside a system save on the NAND. 3DSort edits that file through the same save3ds engine, but it reaches the NAND via a GodMode9 script that dumps the save container to the card first. The app edits it, and a second script injects it back with a hash check end to end. As SalustLab explains: if the check fails the script aborts and the original container stays on the card for recovery.
To run 3DSort you will need a 3DS with custom firmware (Luma3DS) and GodMode9, a PC with an SD card reader, and on Windows specifically the WebView2 runtime, which ships with Windows 10 and 11 by default. The app handles the most sensitive part automatically: it writes a 3DSort_dump script to the card, which dumps the console’s boot9.bin and movable.sed files along with the HOME menu save, so you do not need to copy those by hand.
SalustLab has been open about the fact that the project was heavily assisted by AI, and the source code is available on GitHub with full documentation. That openness is worth respecting. It is also worth heeding the accompanying caution: always do your due diligence before downloading and running software from GitHub, particularly during a period when AI-assisted tools are appearing at pace and the provenance of any given project deserves a second look. Check the repository, read the documentation, and verify what you are running. The full source and setup guide are on GitHub for anyone who wants to inspect the code before committing their SD card to it.
If your 3DS home screen currently looks like a skip fire, 3DSort is the most structured solution available for sorting it out from the comfort of your desktop, and the automatic backup system means there is a sensible safety net in place if anything goes sideways. Windows users should confirm their Microsoft WebView2 runtime is present before launching.
