Tldr: use :sort u
Surprisingly often, I find myself needing to dedupe a list, usually when digging through logs. There are many ways to dedupe a list, but Vim might just be the fastest one.
Take this list of UUIDs I pulled when investigating a recent issue:
02b74975-e399-4268-83e6-b8b931
06c9b33e-195e-478f-ae3c-d0700c
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468f
18b7733b-91e6-46af-8a44-942396
13db0651-08af-4e7e-8e69-00d2a9
06c9b33e-195e-478f-ae3c-d0700c
1821d0a4-9741-48bb-9d8a-dffab5
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468f
1821d0a4-9741-48bb-9d8a-dffab5
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468fFrom a quick look, I can see that a few of those IDs are duplicated. Let’s run regular Vim :sort on that list to make it more obvious:
02b74975-e399-4268-83e6-b8b931
06c9b33e-195e-478f-ae3c-d0700c # Dupe 1
06c9b33e-195e-478f-ae3c-d0700c # Dupe 1
13db0651-08af-4e7e-8e69-00d2a9
1821d0a4-9741-48bb-9d8a-dffab5 # Dupe 2
1821d0a4-9741-48bb-9d8a-dffab5 # Dupe 2
18b7733b-91e6-46af-8a44-942396
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468f # Dupe 3
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468f # Dupe 3
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468f # Dupe 3Ok, it looks like 3 IDs are duplicated. Let’s run :sort u to get a unique list:
02b74975-e399-4268-83e6-b8b931
06c9b33e-195e-478f-ae3c-d0700c
13db0651-08af-4e7e-8e69-00d2a9
1821d0a4-9741-48bb-9d8a-dffab5
18b7733b-91e6-46af-8a44-942396
2368cf5f-488f-4b58-86a0-b4468fThere we go, 6 unique IDs.
Vim’s sort has a few other powerful options, like sorting by number (so 100 comes after 20), or sorting in reverse order, but I use this :sort u deduping functionality the most.