I have a buffer of words and phrases in sorted order and I would like to have the lines sorted in a random order. How would I do this with either an emacs builtin function or with elisp?
For example, given
bar elisp emacs foo hello world the quick brown fox
I would like some completely random result like:
foo the quick brown fox hello world elisp emacs bar
or ...
hello world elisp bar the quick brown fox foo emacs
Similar to Sean's solution, select the region and then:
C-u M-| shuf
M-| pipes the content of selected region to the bash command shuf. shuf shuffles the lines. The prefix C-u takes the output of shuf and uses it to overwrite the selected region.
Alternatively, here is sort-lines adapted to this requirement.
I've removed the reverse argument (obviously not relevant here), and simply supplied a 'comparison' function returning a random result to sort-subr.
(defun my-random-sort-lines (beg end)
"Sort lines in region randomly."
(interactive "r")
(save-excursion
(save-restriction
(narrow-to-region beg end)
(goto-char (point-min))
(let ;; To make `end-of-line' and etc. to ignore fields.
((inhibit-field-text-motion t))
(sort-subr nil 'forward-line 'end-of-line nil nil
(lambda (s1 s2) (eq (random 2) 0)))))))
For the original:
M-x find-function RET sort-lines RET
randomize-region.el seems to do what you want.
If you don't mind shelling out to Perl, you can select the region you want to randomize, and then type C-u M-| perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle <STDIN>'.
I'm sure many other popular programming languages offer similar facilities.
