114

I have lists of files that contain a few columns of data. It is not sorted the way I want from the output, so I'm manually hunting for where a line should be. Is there a way in Notepad++ to sort the lines alphabetically? If so, how?

Canadian Luke
  • 24,199
  • 39
  • 117
  • 171

3 Answers3

169

Since Notepad++ 6.5.2 it is now natively possible to sort lines:

Version v6.9.2 (as of 8/5/16)

Wes Sayeed
  • 13,662
  • 6
  • 41
  • 76
Franck Dernoncourt
  • 20,384
  • 48
  • 186
  • 322
  • 1
    @ScottRhee I updated for the same reason :) – Franck Dernoncourt Aug 26 '14 at 23:57
  • 2
    note that any capital comes before a lower case. ie. A-Z then a-z – Aequitas Jun 14 '15 at 00:05
  • 4
    Thanks for including a screenshot! This other post (http://superuser.com/questions/762279/sorting-lines-in-notepad-without-the-textfx-plugin) is good, but it is very clear from your screenshot what to do. – Eric Hepperle - CodeSlayer2010 Nov 07 '15 at 19:55
  • 3
    It worked! This should be the accepted answer. – Peter Mortensen Jun 13 '16 at 10:57
  • 4
    This is buggy... I had to copy my text and paste into another tab to be able to sort... – Rosdi Sep 08 '16 at 06:56
  • @Rosdi same for me...appreciate your comment. – Alex Sep 27 '16 at 12:04
  • 1
    @Rosdi: What ***exactly*** isn't working? E.g., does it not sort at all? – Peter Mortensen Dec 17 '16 at 17:22
  • STILL buggy and lacking case sensitivity clearly defined option. Why isn't this a feature? (case sensitivity ) (sort as decimal is workaround)? Really? It's a text editor that still has non-intuitive sorting issues. Hmm. I still prefer TextFX - it works and works fine. – B. Shea Aug 16 '17 at 16:33
  • 2
    I saw some problem with sorts, I *think* it can be linked with inconsistent line endings. One solution that helped me to solve the "non-sorting" issue was : *Select all text*, convert all line endings to Linux/Mac/Windows (whichever is **NOT** your operating system), then convert all line-endings to *your operating system ending*. Now It worked fine for me at this point. – Pacopaco Jun 05 '18 at 10:27
  • @Pacopaco That's the only way it works for me. Without modifying the line endings (semicolons in my case), the sort does nothing. – PeterCo Mar 26 '19 at 09:38
  • One can also use "Sort Lines As Number Ascending" if you have timestamps in front of your every log entry. – cryptonkid May 05 '20 at 09:10
  • 1
    In Notepad++ Version v7.9.1 the long awaited feature was implemented as changelog point "15. Add case **in**sensitive lines sorting." – PeterCo Jan 02 '21 at 17:11
49

(Note that this answer was written before np++ 6.5.2 released.)

It seems that Notepad++ doesn't support sorting by default, but Notepad++ has many friends to do something like that for you which we call plugins.

  1. Download TextFX plugin for Notepad++ ( TextFX in SourceForge ) - go to the latest version and download the latest TextFX…bin.zip.
  2. Open the zip and extract NppTextFX.dll to (Program Files)\Notepad++\plugins folder.
  3. Restart Notepad++
  4. To do the sort, select lines to sort, go to TextFX on the main menu and select TextFX Tools - Sort lines.
Scott Rhee
  • 1,983
  • 13
  • 12
  • No need to grab TextFX manually -> First: Update to newest version of NPP. Then pick "Plugins" / "Plugin Manager". It should then populate plugin list. Pick TextFX. "Install". Done. – B. Shea Aug 16 '17 at 16:25
  • Also, native sorting has improved over the years. (Pick "Edit"/"Line Operations") See other answers if you don't want to bother w/ TextFX plugin, though, I recommend it for other reasons.. – B. Shea Aug 16 '17 at 16:27
  • The plugin is now called "TextFX Characters". – Alek Davis Nov 09 '17 at 23:27
6

Since you are using Notepad++, I assume you are using Windows. You have a few other options to sort large text file content alphabetically.

My personal favorite is PowerShell. You could use the Sort-Object cmdlet. The following command shows an example of how to use the cmdlet. We first read the content (Get-Content) of MyFile.txt, pass it to the Sort-Object cmdlet (Sort) and output the result into a new file (Out-File).

Get-Content MyFile.txt | Sort | Out-File MySortedFile.txt

enter image description here

Another option is to use the sort command in the Command Prompt.

sort MyFile.txt /o MySortedFile.txt

enter image description here

Finally, the last option is to use an online tool: miniwebtool.com or sortlines.com will do the job.

Martin
  • 585
  • 2
  • 10
  • 19