sorting - How to sort numeric and literal columns in Vim

Question

Using Vim 6.0. Say I'm editing this file:

sdfsdg
dfgdfg

34     12
2      4
45     1
34     5

How do I sort the second column?

Answer 1

If you have decent shell available, select your numbers and run the command

:'<,'>!sort -n -k 2

If you gonna type this in visual mode, after typing the colon, markers '<,'> will appead automatically, and you'll only have to type the rest of it.

This type of commands (:[motion]!) is called filtering. You can learn more by consulting vim's help:

:h filter