Is there a convenient way to reverse lines in a region (like tac command does)?

Is there an easy way to reverse lines in a region? Like if I have a buffer with this text a b c d e and I select a region consisting of the middle 3 lines and do the reverse lines thing, I should get a buffer like this a d c b e Possible?

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M-x reverse-region

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See `sort-lines` doc, ``` sort-lines is an autoloaded, interactive and natively compiled function defined in sort.el. Signature (sort-lines REVERSE BEG END) Documentation Sort lines in region alphabetically; REVERSE non-nil means descending order. Interactively, REVERSE is the prefix argument, and BEG and END are the region. Called from a program, there are three arguments: REVERSE (non-nil means reverse order), BEG and END (region to sort). The variable sort-fold-case determines whether alphabetic case affects the sort order. ```

If using Evil: `'<,'>g/^/m'<-`

Relatedly, the other day I had to sort the contents of a single line string that had comma separated values, like so: ``` jkl,ghi,abc,def ``` And I had to muck about recording a macro to replace `,` with newlines etc. etc. so I could use `sort-lines`. Is there perchance a function for what I needed?

Try `query-replace` (`M-%`) and `query-replace-regexp` (`C-M-%`). Use `C-q C-j` to insert the newline in the minibuffer. You can higlight a region and use `!` to replace all matches in the region. Otherwise, it starts replacing at point.

Yeah I already did it that way, I'm asking about an existing Emacs function to sort columns of a row or similar. (which I did search for at some length, but didn't find anything) Shout-out to the tip about `C-q C-j` though, that's a very unintuitive way to search-and-replace newlines, so good to highlight.

Should have Ducked it. Just found `sort-symbols` which seems to do the trick! https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SortWords

or just `'<,'>sort!` Evil's fidelity is impressive. I guess Emacs already had all the infrastructure in place (look at the `reverse-region` and `sort-lines` commandsin the other comments.

For similar scenarios I've found shell-command-on-region by itself, and with prefix arg very handy. In this case, it will be a simple C-u M-| tac <enter> By itself, the output goes to a temp buffer, so you can build the command that does what you need. You can also use a series of pipes (just like you would in a shell). For example, you can use the following to add a line number: tac | awk '{print NR, $0}' Once your command is final, you can use the prefix arg to replace the region with the output. Similarly, the question above about sorting comma-separated fields can be done using a pipeline of: tr ',' '\\n'| sort | tr '\\n' ',' It was the first Emacs magic I learnt those decades ago, and have used it hundreds of times over the years :-)

M-x butterfly moment