Sorting Text in GNU Emacs

At first glance, it might appear that Emacs can't deal with tabular data. But dig a little and you'll find Emacs has you covered for most day-to-day tasks.

For sorting text based on a column, select the column.

Then use M-x sort-columns.

 

You'll find that all the lines are sorted by that particular column.

For other available options, see online reference.

On a related note, case-fold-search works at a lower level for controlling case-insensitive search. At package level, it is mostly controlled by a package variable. e.g. for sort-columns, you need sort-fold-case for similar effect. So in case you find it's not working as per your expectations, you might want to dig into the documentation or code.

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