how to sort a 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

and I want to sort the second column

Thanks

Answer 1

If you have descent 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

Answer 2

sort all lines on second column N

:sort /.*\%2v/

reference:
http://rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html

Answer 3

For vim7 I would go for:

:sort n /.*\s/

This will sort numbers ignoring text matched by given regexp. In your case it is second column.