Vim user-defined command filter

Question

I have the following input file:

that I would like to sort by line-length. I can do this by running the command 1,4!awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -n -s | cut -d' ' -f2 which gives the output:

Now I want to create a user-defined command SortL that will do exactly the same as above:

command! -count SortL <count>!awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -n -s | cut -d' ' -f2-

However when I run 1,4SortL on the input file I get:

no changes were made so I must have made a mistake on the definition of SortL. How to define SortL so that lines get sorted by length?

see :h command-range. What you try to pass is a range, not a count. So it is -range not -count and <line1>,<line2> instead of <count> — B.G.
– B.G., Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 11:24

Luc Hermitte · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-17 10:57:28Z

1

Note that it can also be done in vimscript only, which has the advantage of being portable (given it's run from vim -- OK, lambda are quite recent, they are 2 years now?)

command! -range=% SortL 
   \ call setline(<line1>, 
   \              sort(getline(<line1>,<line2>),
   \                   { a, b -> strchars(a) - strchars(b)}))

BTW, strchars() will correctly count the number of glyphs in multi-bytes characters, and not the number of bytes.

edited Apr 17, 2018 at 10:57

answered Apr 17, 2018 at 3:13

Luc Hermitte

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2 Comments

builder-7000 Over a year ago

This doesn't seem to work, I get error 121: Undefined variable: a. Also I'm not familiar with lambdas... could explain what they are?

Luc Hermitte Over a year ago

Lambdas have been introduced in Vim 7.4.2044. If your version of Vim isn't recent enough, this won't work. Instead, you'll need to define a function and pass its Funcref to :sort().

igotmumps · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-16 16:02:01Z

0

Just for completeness, the answer to this is:

command! -range SortL <line1>,<line2>!awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -n -s | cut -d' ' -f2-

answered Apr 16, 2018 at 16:02

igotmumps

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