Vim delete blank lines

701
votes

What command can I run to remove blank lines in Vim?

14
vimvi

14 Answers

1294
votes
:g/^$/d

:g will execute a command on lines which match a regex. The regex is 'blank line' and the command is :d (delete)

191
votes

Found it, it's:

g/^\s*$/d

Source: Power of g at vim wikia

Brief explanation of :g

:[range]g/pattern/cmd

This acts on the specified [range] (default whole file), by executing the Ex command cmd for each line matching pattern (an Ex command is one starting with a colon such as :d for delete). Before executing cmd, "." is set to the current line.

55
votes
:v/./d

or

:g/^$/d

or 

:%!cat -s
46
votes

The following can be used to remove only multi blank lines (reduce them to a single blank line) and leaving single blank lines intact:

:g/^\_$\n\_^$/d
15
votes

  1. how to remove all the blanks lines

    :%s,\n\n,^M,g

    (do this multiple times util all the empty lines went gone)

  2. how to remove all the blanks lines leaving SINGLE empty line

    :%s,\n\n\n,^M^M,g

    (do this multiple times)

  3. how to remove all the blanks lines leaving TWO empty lines AT MAXIMUM,

    :%s,\n\n\n\n,^M^M^M,g

    (do this multiple times)

in order to input ^M, I have to control-Q and control-M in windows

6
votes

How about:

:g/^[ \t]*$/d
5
votes

work with perl in vim:

:%!perl -pi -e s/^\s*$//g

5
votes

This works for me

:%s/^\s*$\n//gc

5
votes

This function only remove two or more blank lines, put the lines below in your vimrc, then use \d to call function

fun! DelBlank()
   let _s=@/
   let l = line(".")
   let c = col(".")
   :g/^\n\{2,}/d
   let @/=_s
   call cursor(l, c)
endfun
map <special> <leader>d :keepjumps call DelBlank()<cr>
4
votes

I tried a few of the answers on this page, but a lot of them didn't work for me. Maybe because I'm using Vim on Windows 7 (don't mock, just have pity on me :p)?

Here's the easiest one that I found that works on Vim in Windows 7:

:v/\S/d

Here's a longer answer on the Vim Wikia: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Remove_unwanted_empty_lines

4
votes
:g/^\s*$/d
^ begin of a line
\s* at least 0 spaces and as many as possible (greedy)
$ end of a line

paste

:command -range=% DBL :<line1>,<line2>g/^\s*$/d

in your .vimrc,then restart your vim. if you use command :5,12DBL it will delete all blank lines between 5th row and 12th row. I think my answer is the best answer!

2
votes

If something has double linespaced your text then this command will remove the double spacing and merge pre-existing repeating blank lines into a single blank line. It uses a temporary delimiter of ^^^ at the start of a line so if this clashes with your content choose something else. Lines containing only whitespace are treated as blank.

%s/^\s*\n\n\+/^^^\r/g | g/^\s*$/d | %s/^^^^.*
1
votes

This worked for me:

:%s/^[^a-zA-Z0-9]$\n//ig

It basically deletes all the lines that don't have a number or letter. Since all the items in my list had letters, it deleted all the blank lines.

1
votes

Press delete key in insert mode to remove blank lines.