Last week I wrote that you can sort lines of text alphabetically in Sublime Text 3. Whilst playing with features under the Edit menu, I happened across the Permute Lines menu. Here's what it does.

Permute Lines

Under Edit > Permute Lines, there are three permutations you can choose from. Each one manipulates the selected lines a certain way. The options are: Reverse, Unique, and Shuffle.

Let's say you have the following text in a file, sorted alphabetically:

Apples
Apples
Bananas
Grapes
Lemons
Limes
Limes
Oranges
Pineapples

The first permutation, called Reverse, simply reverses the order of the list. Here's what the resulting text looks like:

Pineapples
Oranges
Limes
Limes
Lemons
Grapes
Bananas
Apples
Apples

The second one is called Unique. This one may not be as obvious, but it removes duplicate lines. Now the list looks like this:

Pineapples
Oranges
Limes
Lemons
Grapes
Bananas
Apples

The last permutation is called Shuffle. Similar to PHP's shuffle() function, this one randomizes the order of each line. An example looks like this:

Oranges
Apples
Pineapples
Lemons
Limes
Grapes
Bananas

Permute Selections

You can also apply the same permutation methods to selections. That is, when you make multiple selections, you can sort, reverse, shuffle, and remove duplicates by using the Edit > Permute Selections menu.

I haven't really found a need for these ones yet, but I'm sure they'll come in handy at some point.

Did you know about these features? Have you done anything useful with them?