vim - deleting

Helpful commands

command	description
x X	delete character under, before cursor
dm	delete text of movement command m
dd D	delete current line, to the end of line
J gJ	join current line with next, without space
:rd↵	delete range r lines
:rdx↵	delete range r lines into register x

Delete up until a word

Put your cursor at the point you want to start at. Make sure you’re in command mode. hit v to start a visual selection then hit / and type the word you’re looking for to select up to it, then press enter to make the selection then hit d to delete the text

Delete a word along with the whitespace after the word

dw (vw to select in visual mode)

Delete a word but not the the whitespace after the word

de (ve to select in visual mode)

Delete unnecessary spaces and tabs in empty lines in Vim

(This doesn’t seem to work with eclipse vim plugin and emacs vi mode)

In a search, \s finds whitespace (a space or a tab), and \+ finds one or more occurrences.

The following command deletes any trailing whitespace at the end of each line. If no trailing whitespace is found no change occurs, and the e flag means no error is displayed.

:%s/\s\+$//e

Delete whitespace in blank lines but do not delete the blank lines

:%s/^\s\+$//

% — execute for all lines

s/^\s\+$// — search and replace command:

search lines that only have whitespaces and replace with an empty string.

Delete all text before search pattern

If you have a file that looks like below

1: #sometext
2: #sometext
3: #sometext

If you want to delete the text before the pattern “:” (colon). I have used the following command to replace every

:%s/^.*/\://

If want to delete the texts after the pattern “:” (colon). I have used the following command to replace every

:%s/\:.*$//

I would like to learn other ways to do.

Another answer :

Do you want to not include the colon? If so, then for deleting everything before (but not including) the colon

:%s/.*\ze://

And for everything after

:%s/:\zs.*//

See :help \zs and :help \ze for more info.

I remember them as z == zero-width (since they don’t match anything).

If you want to delete all characters before “Hello”, you can do

:%s/.*Hello/Hello/

Note that .* is greedy, i.e. it will eat all occurrences of “Hello” till it finds the last one. If you have a line: abcHellodefHelloghi - it will become - Helloghi If you want a non-greedy solution, try -

:%s/.\{-}Hello/Hello

Delete duplicate rows in vi

:sort u

Delete all blank (empty) lines

To delete blank lines in vim (empty lines), use this command -

:g/^$/d

The g character says, “perform the following operation globally in this file.” (Operate on all lines in this file.)

The forward slash characters enclose the pattern I’m trying to match. In this case I want to match blank lines, so I use the regular expression ^$. Here the ^ means “beginning of line,” and $ means “end of line,” so with no characters in between them, this vim regex means “blank line.” (If I had typed ^abc$, that would mean, “find a line with only the sequence of characters ‘abc’”.)

The d at the end of the command says, “When you find this pattern, delete the line.”

Delete Lines Beginning With a certain text In Vim

:g/^(enter text here)/d

Delete line containing certain text in vim

Without confirmation

:g/<text>/d

With confirmation

:g/<text>/s/.*\n//c

Delete all lines that do NOT contain a certain word in Vim

:%g!/price/d

This deletes every line that doesn’t contain the word “price”

Delete trailing whitespaces at the end of each line

The following command deletes any trailing whitespace at the end of each line. If no trailing whitespace is found no change occurs, and the e flag means no error is displayed.

:%s/\s\+$//e

Delete text between all braces {} in vim

You can do this with the global command.

:g/{/normal f{da{

What is this doing:

For all lines containing a {, move to the first { on that line and delete everything from there up to and including a matching }.

If you want to add a ; at the end - which I suspect would be the next thing you’d want - you can add a A; at the end of that command.

Note: This might break if you have comments or strings containing {}s in your file.