====== Sort selection ======

One common and convenient use case of the '[[http://www.geany.org/manual/#sending-text-through-custom-commands|Send selection to]]' feature is to sort a selection of lines alphabetically.

To do so, simply a custom command to use the **sort** command line utility.
Open the corresponding dialog by using the //Edit->Format->Send Selection->Set Custom Commands// menu item.

{{:config:customcmds:sort_selection_unix.png|}}

Here we used **sort** and **sort -u**, the latter one to sort lines uniquely which means that multiple
occurrences of the same line will be removed.

After configuration is done, you can simply sort selected lines by using
//Edit->Format->Send Selection->sort//

Example text before:
<code>
2015-05-12 some text
2015-03-04 and some more text
2015-02-04 some other text
2015-03-04 some text
</code>

After using the corresponding menu item (or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-1)
the selection will change to:
<code>
2015-02-04 some other text
2015-03-04 and some more text
2015-03-04 some text
2015-05-12 some text
</code>

Please note, Geany automatically defines the keyboard shortcuts
Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2 and Ctrl-3 to the first three items in the configuration dialog.
Further items currently cannot be executed by keyboard shortcuts.


More details can be found in Geany's manual at http://www.geany.org/manual/#sending-text-through-custom-commands.

==== Configuration on Windows ====

As usual, things are a bit different on Windows.
The first pitfall is that there is also a **sort** utility available, provided by Windows itself.
However, it doesn't work together with Geany.
But Geany ships a **sort** command line utility from the UnxUtils project(http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/) which can be used.

In the //Set Custom Commands// dialog, specify the full path to the included sort.exe, e.g.
//C:/Program Files (x86)/Geany/bin/sort.exe//.

You might notice that we used forward slashes here instead of Windows like backslashes.
This is because normal backslashes won't work here though double backslashes would work
alternatively.

The green and red icons left to the path text field indicate whether Geany could find
and use the entered command.

{{:config:customcmds:sort_selection_windows.png|}}


{{tag>configure sort selection}}