I didn’t know how to sort lines in Vim by an arbitary pattern, but figured it would be possible and pretty easy. And it is:
:sort /||\w*|/ r
I’ve been playing about with Snownews in lieu of Newsbeuter (I keep going back and updating this post about command line apps) and I’d sorted my list of feeds alphabetically, but wanted to get them back to being sorted by category. The good thing about Snownews is that it is very unixy: text in/out and text config files. So although Snownews doesn’t offer a sort by category feature all you have to do is open up the .snownews/urls file and sort it how you want. Snow news uses two | characters after the url to mark the start of the categories and another | at the end, so all the above does is sort based on that bit of text.
On a related note, I found this old rant by Zed about Snownews. I thought it was funny because it really doesn’t take that much effort to add the “crappy” Atom xsltproc filter to all Atom feeds, especially since you can just open up the urls file and text edit away.
I would still like to get Newsbeuter running, just because. It also looks like the thing about NetBSD being unsupported is unfounded because there is a pkg here. Anyway, I think I’ve finally figured out why it doesn’t build on OSX 10.5 PPC: Basically because I’m using an out-of-date version of the C++ standard libraries. I.e. I get errors relating to the hashtable file. Unfortunately the fixes in those links don’t solve my issue, but they did make me realise that Newsbeuter is probably using things not available in the version of the C++ standard libs I have; I tried to install gcc46 (to get more upto-date C++ standard libraries) from Macports, but I just don’t have enough disk space for the build and install. So with Snownews I shall be sticking for the foreseeable future.
My biggest annoyances with Snownews are the content encoded issue and that I can’t seem to reliably add a keybinding for Space that does “enter” and not page down as well. But it’s hardly a deal breaker for me.