Org mode is recommended if you have tabular data, in case there are any Emacs users that still haven't tried it. (Which might sound ridiculous - but who knows? I still haven't used magit! I've been using Emacs since 2006.)
You can sort the table using M-x org-table-sort-lines.
(Org mode tables, while simple plain text, are very readable. Anybody not using Emacs is going to find them tedious to edit though.)
If you use both git and Emacs but not magit, you're missing out. It's so good that it makes me keep Emacs open even when I'm using another editor or an IDE. These days pretty much everything has basic git integration, but few interfaces can match magit at doing non-trivial operations conveniently. With magit, it only takes a few keystrokes to selectively commit some changed lines, reword a past commit, do an interactive rebase, or use the reflog.
For me, being able to go straight from a selection in a code file to a log of all changes to that specific code, which I can then filter further, is what gets the strongest reactions from my coworkers.
WHAT!? You can use M-x magit-log-buffer-file with an active selection and see only the changes to the selected portion? This is so obvious in hindsight and so cool... Thanks a million!
It's unfortunately hidden because it has no default keybinding iirc, but I love this feature. I think I discovered it by wondering if it exists, so I searched through the M-x candidates with orderless and typed in terms that I guessed could be part of the right name.
The documentation is very good. The Getting Started[0] page has all you need for basic operations. I haven't watched this particular video[1], but Prot's other Emacs content is great.
I watched the video. It is quite informative. The best thing about emacs videos are they creator is that all the keycommands show on the screen by default. Arguably one of the slickest features in emacs.
org-mode tables are great. So is magit, I highly recommend it! I'm comfortable with command line git, use it quite a lot, but I also use magit a lot, and magit is especially great as a much better `git add -p`.
If anything, magit made me more comfortable with command line Git, by helping me discover things (--force-with-lease) and grok concepts (history editing) that I otherwise would not learn as quickly.
I found that keeping tables narrow (not too many characters per line) helps. I try to build my tables so that most of the logic (I do spreadsheets with them) is oriented towards more rows instead of more columns.
However, I've not had 2000 lines tables yet. Perhaps a good trick is to divide them into multiple ones? Perhaps one for each category of things, if you have any different categories.
> magit is especially great as a much better `git add -p`.
In Git, except for when adding new files, I always use `git add -p` to stage changes. And it's definitely the number one thing I do with Magic in terms of frequency. I can confirm that if you're an `add -p` kinda person, you'll love Magit.
Any tips on how to do that? Ideally using just built in functions…
I usually insert newlines between the elements, use a line-based sort, then recombine the lines. That works but is more tedious than I’d like. I’ve never taken the time to wrap that logic it in a function because it’s infrequent and it seems like it’s always slightly different.
I found this on the Emacs Wiki [1]. It seems to work:
(defun sort-symbols (reverse beg end)
"Sort symbols in region alphabetically, in REVERSE if negative.
See `sort-words'."
(interactive "*P\nr")
(sort-regexp-fields reverse "\\(\\sw\\|\\s_\\)+" "\\&" beg end))
"split-string" works well for this situation but for a case where there are commas inside some of the strings it would chop in the middle of those strings. So for the latter case and assuming the commas are consistently formatted, a safer approach might be starting in front of the first s-expression and then traversing to the tail of each s-expression with "forward-sexp" and check to see if a comma is there as expected and then delete the comma there (except for the last item with no comma) .
Yeah that's the classic comma in CSV problem. The solution is to indeed use a proper grammar/parser. The "forward-sexp" understands that as per major-mode rule as you say. Another more modern and declarative solution would be to take advantage of the full parse tree at your disposal thanks to tree-sitter (available in Emacs 29.1). Then you can simply do:
(let ((list (treesit-thing-at-point "list" 'nested))
(query "(list (string (string_content) @item))"))
(cl-loop for (_ . item) in (treesit-query-capture list query)
collect (treesit-node-text item t)))
I lean a fair bit in the opposite direction. If a sort is any more complex than -n or -k<number no flags>, I tend to vipe¹ my sort in my editor.
It feels great when you can use narrow-to-region² to perfect a complex address or write a custom function with all your editor's power at your fingertips. With the sad, but obvious, drawback that the changes aren't linked in your disjoint shell and editor history.
Keyboard macro. You convert the arrays into lines, you sort the result and then turn them back into arrays. If you do this often you could store the macro as an interactive command.
Copy to clipboard, paste into your interactive Python window, and use as the argument to sorted. Copy and paste the interpreter's output back into your code.
You technically described how to make a word sorting macro execute arbitrary code.
Fascinating to think how that doesn't mean it's bad advice. That is, unless your threat model includes targeted attacks by three-letter-scale adversaries — and then you maybe just don't open untrusted files in Emacs or use advice from strangers on HN.
That's a good point. My assumption, not that I ever stated it, was that the list would be one you'd typed out yourself, or was one that was just there in code already, and you could verify by eye that it's just string literals.
Using Python's eval with empty globals and locals dicts (consult the docs) could make this safer, though I've only ever had to use that for defending against accidents rather than malice. And now this quick thing is becoming increasingly complicated, and maybe you'd be better off engineering it properly.
This is actually a rather common thing to do.. I have functions that run shell commands in my spacemacs config to do things like this. For example I've got one that runs `date` to insert today's date in a particular format.
You can sort the table using M-x org-table-sort-lines.
(Org mode tables, while simple plain text, are very readable. Anybody not using Emacs is going to find them tedious to edit though.)