[Github-comments] [geany/geany] [Feature request] Sorting text (#2782)

[elextr]

@mdziczkowski just to expand my initial comment

Note that there are far too many possible functionalities to build everything in, all IDEs and editors use plugins/extensions to extend functionality rather than add it to the core for several reasons:

1 .  Just because its important to you doesn't mean its important to everybody, people editing source code don't need line sort since sorting code lines doesn't make sense, but other language specific sorts might, so why should everybody wear the cost of the features.  A quick search of the vscode extensions found a whole page of various sort extensions targeting different use-cases including your by-line case.

2. because plugins/extensions have a defined interface and can be excluded they can be created by people with less experience in the internals of the application allowing more people to contribute, code that is built in needs to be better quality because it can't be excluded if it causes problems, so it causes more work for the core team and requires more knowledge and experience of the contributors, so less overall improvements happen if its all in core.

3. if something is in core there is only ever likely to be one way of doing it, so areas where there is a big divergence of use-cases for a particular functionality its better to have that functionality as plugins/extensions so users can choose the one that suits their use-case, hence two project plugins and two debugger plugins in the geany-plugins collection.

Also, with the external sort that @eht16 pointed out, you can of course use any criteria that an external program can support and you can use that now without waiting for anything to be added to the plugin or core.  You can even write your own esoteric sort scripts in any language you like, whereas Geany is C only.

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