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 alphanumerically in a similar manner with :{range} sort u.

In vim, how do you sort a range of lines by the length of the line? Such that shorter lines are followed by longer lines.

Searching the internet, I found this:

:% s/.*/\=printf("%03d", len(submatch(0)))."|".submatch(0)/ | sor n | %s/..../ 

But that only works to sort the entire file, and is black magic to me anyway. I'm trying to figure out how to do that same sort with a range such as from line 4 to 18, as in :4,18 s/... Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

Filter Visual Selection with Awk

One way to do this in vim is by filtering the visual selection with awk's length() function before sorting. For example:

:'<,'> ! awk '{ print length(), $0 | "sort -n | cut -d\\  -f2-" }'