Range sort and rsort do nothing

[devinschulz]

Summary

:sort and rsort don't appear to work in any interactions I've tried (characters starting with either numbers or letters). As a long-time vim user, I expected it to work the same.

Reproduction Steps

https://asciinema.org/a/FrVjmyIXpxmfyYtyxbKKTmeev

I tried this:

1. select a few lines of text
2. type :sort or :rsort
3. nothing happens

I expected this to happen:

The lines should be sorted in order

Instead, this happened:

Nothing happens

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

2023-04-21T10:47:52.697 helix_vcs [ERROR] failed to obtain current head name for //test.txt 2023-04-21T10:48:19.532 helix_view::editor [ERROR] editor error: 1 unsaved buffer(s) remaining: ["test.txt"]

Platform

MacOS

Terminal Emulator

Alacritty 0.11.0

Helix Version

helix 23.03 (3cf0372)

[pascalkuthe]

helixes :sort command is more general then vims and doesn't operate on lines and instead sorts the selections. For helix multi cursors/selections are a core part of the editing model. You can create on cursors manually with c or use a regex with s to create a selection at each regex match within the current selection. You can split an existing selection at line boundaries with A-s. Then using :sort afterward matches vims sort command but you can also sort words for example: s\w+<ret>:sort<ret> selects and then sorts all words in the selections.

[devinschulz]

Gotcha, that makes sense. Just my limited understanding of how the editor works. Thanks for clarifying 😀

[jnns]

I just noticed that :pipe sort (or |sort) works as one would expect from vim.