Mark and c pa,
Thanks for your ideas. C pa, The idea of sorting the selection as words is interesting and one I would like to keep up my sleeve, however I need to get a hybrid of yours and Marks to sort the lines, keeping the line breaks. It's about sorting lines, in fact it will help sort lines beginning with * , # or even ":" to make bulleted/indented lists alphabetical or sort text as keys about to be pasted into a data tiddler etc...
Further issues arising
Regex as a way to include special characters like line breaks
This prompts me to ask can we use regex to insert a line break where we want in a filter. ie rather than search or transform text/titles with regex can it be used to generate special characters into the filter output?
Line handling in filters and sorting primitives
This makes me question why we do not have the primitives needed for handling rows/lines and sorting them, in filters and sorting tools outside of the filters. This is all simple javascript, I expect already contained within tiddlywiki just not surfaced for users and designers.
You answers and this problem also dovetails with a project to have a leading period "." to render a line in html p tags. We could sort paragraphs as well, this sounds a little odd but it depends what the paragraphs are.
Line or paragraph based excise, WOW!.
What if we had an excise tool that would automatically generate multiple paragraph based tiddlers, tagging them with a named tag (or equivalent), we could then quickly extract paragraphs to separate tiddlers in a single select step, and use the tag (or equivalent), to reorder them manually. Since they are related by tag the generated tiddlers can be renamed and or given captions separately. In this case after excise we would insert into the source tiddler the list macro to display the paragraphs so tagged. If desired this list could have a template= added to handle the way each paragraph is displayed, including the possibility of making them drag drop reordered in the source tiddler. Even better is the template would be selectable and you could use an edit template, or view template from inside the source tiddler.
Regards
Tony