Sorting Stuff in the VIM Buffer

Gregg

Suppose I have a file that I am editing in vim with the following contents:

$ cat file.txt Red 4 Blue 3 Green 1 Orange 7 Black 8 Yellow 6 Purple 2 White 5

If I want to sort this data in vim, the first thing to do is to format it into columns using the column command:

:%!column -t

Which will put the data in the following format:
Red 4
Blue 3
Green 1
Orange 7
Black 8
Yellow 6
Purple 2
White 5

Then we can sort on the 2nd column using the sort command:

:%!sort -k2nr

Which will update the buffer like this:
Black 8
Orange 7
Yellow 6
White 5
Red 4
Blue 3
Purple 2
Green 1