Everyone hits this. You have a bulleted list in the wrong order, an outline whose sections need shuffling, or a few paragraphs that read better flipped around. On a desktop with a mouse you can sort of muddle through with cut and paste. On a phone it is genuinely painful: tap to place the cursor, drag the selection handles, cut, scroll, place the cursor again, paste, then clean up the blank lines you just mangled.
The fix is to stop editing character by character and start moving whole pieces. That is exactly what TextLab Arrange Mode does: it breaks your text into draggable chunks, you drag them into the order you want, and it puts everything back together without touching the formatting of the parts you did not move.
What Arrange Mode does
Arrange Mode splits your text into segments, shows each one as a row you can grab and drag, and reassembles the result when you are done. The key idea: the spacing between segments stays where it is. If you swap two paragraphs, the blank line between them, the bullet characters, and every other line break survive exactly as they were. You are reordering content, not reflowing the document.
You choose how the text is split. There are four ways:
- Lines - every line becomes a row. Best for lists, CSV-like data, log lines, or anything one-item-per-line.
- Blocks - paragraphs separated by a blank line become rows. Best for prose, outlines, and notes. A multi-line bullet list counts as one block, so it moves as a unit.
- Sentences - each sentence becomes a row, detected with the system's language-aware sentence tokenizer. Best for tightening a paragraph or resequencing an argument.
- Custom - split on any delimiter you type: a comma, a semicolon, a tab, a pipe, or any string. Best for reordering comma-separated tags or values. (Not sure what a delimiter is? See what is a delimiter.)
Step by step: reorder paragraphs
- Open TextLab and paste or type your text (or send it in from another app with the Share Sheet).
- Tap Arrange Mode in the toolbar.
- Choose Blocks at the top. Your paragraphs appear as rows.
- Drag a paragraph up or down by its handle until the order looks right.
- Tap Done. The reordered text replaces your document, blank lines and all.
That is the whole loop. Changed your mind? One tap of Undo puts it back exactly as it was - the entire rearrangement is a single undo step, not dozens of tiny edits to walk back.
Step by step: sort or clean a list
Arrange Mode is not only manual dragging. There is a one-tap operations menu that works on the current rows:
- Reverse order - flip the whole list end to end.
- Sort A-Z - alphabetical, case-insensitive.
- Sort by length - shortest to longest, handy for tidy columns.
- Remove duplicates - keep the first occurrence of each line, drop the rest.
- Shuffle - randomize the order, useful for quiz items or raffle entries.
- Trim whitespace - strip stray spaces from the start and end of each row.
A common combination: split a messy comma list in Custom mode, run Trim whitespace, then Remove duplicates, then Sort A-Z, and you have a clean sorted set in four taps. The segment counter at the bottom tells you how many items you are working with at every step.
Why not just cut and paste?
Cut and paste works for one move. It falls apart at three or more, because every move risks eating a line break or leaving a double blank line, and there is no clean "undo the whole thing" - you have to reverse each step. Arrange Mode treats the reorder as one operation: drag as many rows as you like, preview the order, and commit once. The structural whitespace is positional, so it never collapses your paragraphs into a wall of text.
If you have used the Arrange feature in Drafts and missed it elsewhere, this is the same idea, available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with sort and dedupe built in.
Undo and redo, everywhere
Arrange Mode pairs naturally with full undo and redo in the editor. Every change - typing, a transformation, or a rearrangement - is a step you can move backward and forward through. On Mac the familiar Command-Z and Shift-Command-Z work; on iPhone and iPad there are dedicated buttons in the toolbar. Experiment freely; nothing is destructive.
It stays on your device
Splitting, reordering, sorting, and reassembling text are all local operations. Nothing is uploaded, and there are no accounts. The same Arrange Mode runs identically on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so a list you start arranging on your phone behaves exactly the same when you open the app on your desktop.
Where it fits
Reach for Arrange Mode whenever order matters more than wording: reordering a to-do list, sequencing the steps of a recipe or runbook, rearranging an outline before you write, reshuffling tags, or putting survey responses into a sensible order. It is one of those small features that quietly removes a recurring annoyance, on the device you happen to be holding.