I still didn't find a built-in easy way to do this so I added a new method to the tablesorter (around line 576 where all the other bindings are):
.bind("reSort",function() { cache = buildCache(this); var sortList = config.sortList; $this.trigger('sorton', [sortList]); }) And then just call $('#myTable').trigger('reSort'); when you need to refresh the sort while keeping the current sorting order. Another way would have been to first trigger 'update' manually and the trigger 'sorton' without any parameters. For some reason the sorton event requires the list-parameter though, so it would have still required a tweak there to use config.sortList if the list-parameter was empty. HTH -- Suni