Alphabetically sorting a bunch of text is something I need to do fairly
regularly. Thankfully Emacs has a built-in function to help with that:
sort-lines.
It looks like this:
Calling M-x sort-lines will sort all lines in the current region. Lines are
sorted numerically, then alphabetically, and capital letters are sorted before
lower-case ones (e.g. A will come before a).
Emacs will only sort text in the highlighted region, so it's important to mark everything that needs sorting. Otherwise it can end up like this:
sort-lines is one of those handy little functions that I never knew I wanted,
until I was sat with a pile of unsorted text and wondering "I wonder if Emacs
can help".