Sort lines ignoring leading component

Question

I would like to sort some lines, ignoring a leading part of them.

Here's an example from my .spacemacs file:

'(
     better-defaults
     elixir
     emacs-lisp
     erlang
     evil-commentary
     finance
     git
     haskell
     html
     ivy
     javascript
     lua
     markdown
     my-eshell
     my-org
     nginx
     nixos
     (org :variables org-projectile-file "TODO.org")
     python
     (ruby :variables ruby-test-runner 'rspec)
     shell-scripts
     spell-checking
     (syntax-checking :variables syntax-checking-enable-tooltips nil)
     vinegar
     yaml
)

I would like to sort these, but I need to ignore the leading ( for that.

Similarly, here's an excerpt from my configuration.nix:

packages = with pkgs; [
      ## Basics
      atool
      bashInteractive
      entr
      ethtool
      fasd
      fd
      file
      fzf
      git
      git-crypt
      gitAndTools.hub
      google-cloud-sdk
      gparted
      hdparm
      htop
      i7z
      inotify-tools
      iperf
      lm_sensors
      neovim
      p7zip
      parted
      pwgen
      ripgrep
      sshfs
      # tarsnap
      tmux
      tree
      unzip
      wget
      xclip
      zip
];

Here, I would like to sort the lines, ignoring the leading # part.

How would I do this in Vim?

I'm aware of :sort /\v# /, but that would only sort lines that match the pattern, then ignore the pattern for sorting.

Answer 1

You can do this with the following command:

:sort /^\s*\(# \)\?/

This skips the # if it exists, and then sorts on the remainder of the line. However, the pattern matches every line, so all lines are sorted into a single group.

You will want to add a range to the start of the command to apply this to the appropriate lines in your file.

The following command also works, coming at it from the opposite direction:

:sort r /\s*\(# \)\?\zs.*/

Instead of skipping the matched part of the line, this sorts on the matched part, but we use \zs to exclude the # from the match, if it exists.