Smart Sort

Sort CSV-like words or lines in Visual Studio Code.

Summary

Smart Sort allows you to:

1. Sort words separated by comma, tab, pipe (|) or space
2. Sort lines by comparing selected parts of them, or entire content of them

Smart Sort chooses how and what to sort according to the selection state so there are just 2 commands provided: one for sorting ascending order, one for sorting descending order.

Note that Smart Sort recognizes numeric value (e.g.: 2 comes before 10).

Key bindings

Those key bindings will be enabled by default.

Configuration

• smartSort.preferWordSorting
  • When multiple lines are selected by a single selection, setting true to this configuration makes Smart Sort to sort words spread over the lines, instead of sorting the lines. See explanation below for detail. (default: false)

Sorting words

To sort words, just select some words and hit Ctrl+Alt+R (or Cmd+Ctrl+R on mac.)

Smart Sort automatically recognizes the word separator. In order of priority, supported separators are:

1. Comma (U+0013)
2. Tab (U+0009)
3. Pipe (U+007C)
4. Space (U+0020)

On sorting words, word separators among them will be normalized. Strictly writing, whitespace characters surrounding the first word separator will be treated as part of the separator and they will be used to separate sorted words.

Here are some example animations:

• Comma
  
• Tab
  
• Pipe
  
• Space
  

Sorting lines

To sort lines, select multiple lines and hit Ctrl+Alt+R (or Cmd+Ctrl+R on mac.)

If you select portions of lines by using multple selections (multi-cursor), the lines which are touched by the selection range will be sorted by comparing the selected parts. This is useful if you want to sort on arbitrary column of visually aligned text data such as output of ps command or CSV data.

Here are some example animations:

1. Sort visually aligned lines by specific "column"
   
2. Sort lines by entire content (CSV colorized with Rainbow CSV)
   
3. Sort lines by comparing selected parts
   

Sorting words spread over multiple lines

If smartSort.preferWordSorting is configured as true, Smart Sort will sort words instead of lines under the condition shown below:

• there is only one selection range (not using multi-cursor), AND
• both the start and end of the selection range are NOT placed at a beginning of a line (placed in a middle of a line or at the end of a line).

In this mode, sorted words will be reflowed. In other words, the original indentation and line widths will remain unchanged. (for example, the indentation characters of the second line is kept unchanged in the example animation below).

Note that if you place both the start and end of the selection range are placed at a beginning of a line, you can always sort lines even if you set true to smartSort.preferWordSorting.

Here is an example animation:

• Sorting import target in Julia language:
  
  In this example, we don't need to care about where to insert a new target; just appending one and sorting them will move it to the right place.

Historical Background

Previously the name of this extension was "Stable Sort". Here is why I wanted and created an extension which uses stable sort algorithm.

Back when Visual Studio Code was version 1.27.2, it have used unstable sort algorithm. This means that sorting textually identical words or lines may change those order. This behavior will not be a problem in most cases since swapping those is not a change by all means.

Unfortunately, I encountered an exceptional case. In Japanese locale, an ASCII digit character and its counter part in fullwidth forms are treated as equal so the order of words like below changed every time I sort them:

2型糖尿病
２型糖尿病

This behavior was very annoying when I was compositing dictionary data since I cannot normalize entries by simple sorting. Obviously an extension which allows me to sort entries using stable sort algorithm solves the problem. So, I created one.