Sorting functions by name in VimEdit

Created , updated

This can be tricky. The basic idea is:

  1. Collapse each function onto one line (note that you can only do this if you have a non-ambiguous way of identifying the beginning and end of each function)
  2. Sort the one-liners
  3. Expand the one-liners back into multi-line form

The trick here is to use a unique marker to represent newlines (eg. @@@) so that they can be correctly restored.

Example

Given some JavaScript methods in an object:

const methods = {
    foo() {
        // contents
    },

    bar() {
        // contents
    },

    baz() {
        // contents
    },
};

Here we can make a pattern that identifies the start of each method (in this case, ) {; but note, if we had if statements or similar inside the methods we’d need to come up with something more specific, like () { or something more complicated).

Likewise, we can identify the end of each method by looking for },.

So, with that in mind:

" select range to be sorted, then:
:g/\v\) \{/,/\v\},/ s/$\n/@@@
" (Vim expands that to: `:'<,'>g/\v\) \{/,/\v\},/ s/$\n/@@@`

" Then select the lines and:
:sort
" (Vim expands that to: `:'<,'>sort`)

" Then select the lines and split back onto multiple lines again:
:s/@@@/\r/g
" (Vim expands that to: `:'<,'>s/@@@/\r/g`)

See also

Source