Natural Reverse Sort

[mrbrahman]

I see there is an option to perform Reverse sorting, and also Natural sorting. But don't see an option to do Natural-Reverse sort. Can one be added please?

Thank you!

[jasonrudolph]

Thanks for the suggestion. I agree that it would be nice to be able to get lines sorted in reverse natural order.

If we add an "in reverse" variant of every sorting option, I worry about it cluttering up the UI and making it harder to find the sorting option you're looking for:

Instead of providing an "in reverse" variant of each individual sorting option, I think we'd be better served by providing a command to reverse the current order, regardless of what the current order is. People could then combine that command with any of the sorting commands as desired. For example, you could use the "sort in natural order" command followed by the "reverse current order" command to get the lines sorted in reverse natural order.

I suspect that some people will want quick access to a single command to "sort in natural order in reverse", "sort ignoring case in reverse", etc., and those folks can define a command in their init script to meet that need. For example, using the currently-available commands, you could define a custom command to remove duplicate lines and then sort the remaining lines:

atom.commands.add('atom-text-editor', {
  'me:sort-and-remove-duplicates' () {
    const editor = atom.workspace.getActiveTextEditor()
    const editorView = atom.views.getView(editor)
    atom.commands.dispatch(editorView, 'sort-lines:unique')
    atom.commands.dispatch(editorView, 'sort-lines:sort')
  }
})

To me, this feels like the best of both worlds: We'd provide the ability to perform the sorting that people want, and we avoid cluttering the UI and command palette with so many options that it's hard to find the one you're looking for.

If anyone wants to implement a command to reverse the current order, I'd be happy to review the pull request and try to get it merged.

[jasonrudolph]

Instead of providing an "in reverse" variant of each individual sorting option, I think we'd be better served by providing a command to reverse the current order, regardless of what the current order is. People could then combine that command with any of the sorting commands as desired. For example, you could use the "sort in natural order" command followed by the "reverse current order" command to get the lines sorted in reverse natural order.

...

If anyone wants to implement a command to reverse the current order, I'd be happy to review the pull request and try to get it merged.

Since we already have #20 tracking the request for a "reverse current order" command, I'm going to close this issue