Sort Git Tags

When you list tags in Git, they are sorted in lexicographical order, which is not always the most useful order. For example, if you have tags for versions of your software, you might want to see them in version order.

Example of listing tags:

╰─ git tag
0.1.0
0.2.0
0.3.0
0.3.1
0.4.0
0.5.0
0.6.0
0.6.1
v0.10.0
v0.11.0
v0.12.0
v0.13.0
v0.13.1
v0.7.0
v0.8.0
v0.9.0

You can sort tags by version number using the following command, which uses the sort command to sort the tags from the GNU Core Utils (for example on macOS, look further down).

╰─ git tag | gsort --reverse --version-sort
v0.13.1
v0.13.0
v0.12.0
v0.11.0
v0.10.0
v0.9.0
v0.8.0
v0.7.0
0.6.1
0.6.0
0.5.0
0.4.0
0.3.1
0.3.0
0.2.0
0.1.0

The sort command is used to sort the output of git tag. The -r flag sorts the tags in reverse order, so the newest tags are listed first. The --version-sort flag sorts the tags by version number, so they are listed in version order.

You can create an alias for this command by adding the following line to your .gitconfig file:

[alias]
    tags = !git tag | sort -r --version-sort

Do note this is the GNU sort command, so it might not work on all systems. If you are on macOS, you can install the GNU Core Utils using Homebrew:

```bash
brew install coreutils

Then you can use the gsort command instead of sort:

git tag | gsort -r --version-sort

Before I new all this I had created a basic Perl script to do it, available as a Gist AND then I learned a tonnes about the sort command and the --version-sort option from a comment - just awesome.

And finally I ended up with the following aliases

[alias]
    rtags = !git tag | gsort -r --version-sort
    tags = !git tag | gsort --version-sort

The rtags alias lists the tags in descending version order (newest/highest at the top) and the tags alias lists them in ascending version order (oldest/lowest at the top), which is also the default behavior of git tag.