How do you sort a range of lines by length?

Question

Often I just want to sort all my #include\'s at the top of my source and header files by their length.

vim allows me to sort alphanumerical

Answer 1

One way, neither elegant nor efficient, but it works:

Add following function to your vimrc file. It inserts at the beginning of each line its number of characters, sort them numerically and deletes the numbers.

function! SortLines() range
    execute a:firstline . "," . a:lastline . 's/^\(.*\)$/\=strdisplaywidth( submatch(0) ) . " " . submatch(0)/'
    execute a:firstline . "," . a:lastline . 'sort n'
    execute a:firstline . "," . a:lastline . 's/^\d\+\s//'
endfunction

Call it with a range of numbers, like

:4,18call SortLines()

or in Visual mode using V, like:

:'<,'>call SortLines()

EDIT: Ops, now I realised that this solution is very similar to yours. It was fine, only that % means the complete buffer instead :4,18 or :'<,:'> that selects specific lines.