import/order: alphabetize import type above (or below) import

[aaronadamsCA]

For the version where types are mixed within groups, it would be nice if ^ was actually enforced. We have a bunch of

import type A from 'a';
import A from 'a';
import B from 'b';
import type B from 'b';

and it would be great to have a more strict ordering if the library is going to start being type-import aware. For reference, @typescript-eslint/consistent-type-imports extracts type imports and places them directly above their corresponding regular imports (though it has no on-going opinion after the initial extraction).

Originally posted by @merrywhether in #2070 (comment)

This would be nice. The main reason we sort imports is to minimize merge conflicts, and I've noticed when sorting with this plugin that it has no opinion on the order between these two lines:

import { foo } from "./foo";
import type { Foo } from "./foo";

Both simple-import-sort and, as mentioned, @typescript-eslint/consistent-type-imports place import type (or export type) above import (or export) when the paths are identical; that seems like it could be a good precedent to follow.

This might be as easy as concatenating importKind within the alphabetize comparator; I tried this with a local monkey patch and it seemed to do the trick.

[aaronadamsCA]

As an amusing side effect, this terrible monkey patch also appears to perfectly resolve #1881, since the alphabetization algorithm is slightly influenced by the appended text.

  const comparator = alphabetizeOptions.caseInsensitive
    ? (a, b) => sorterFn(`${a.value.toLowerCase()}|${a.node.importKind}`, `${b.value.toLowerCase()}|${b.node.importKind}`)
    : (a, b) => sorterFn(`${a.value}|${a.node.importKind}`, `${b.value}|${b.node.importKind}`);

[ljharb]

@aaronadamsCA that type of comparison is what it used to do, and that caused bugs. That patch would break tests.

[ljharb]

I would expect type imports to always sort after value ones, since the types are far far less important and valuable.

I agree that this plugin should have an opinion about which order it sorts those in.

[aaronadamsCA]

Note that I filed #2398 as a first attempt at solving this.