Yes, it's that simple. You could create a range in advance, such as 'a,. (from mark 'a' to the current line) or you could create one on-the-fly using visual selection by pressing ':' in visual mode, after selecting the text you wish to sort, to get a range of '<,'> on the command line. If you like using an external sort utility instead, you can do it just as easily. For example, Unix sort, removing duplicate lines: :{range}!sort -u