How to Delete Lines in Vim / Vi

How to Delete Lines in Vim / Vi 

 https://linuxize.com/post/vim-delete-line/

 

 Deleting a Line

The command to delete a line in Vim is   dd .

Below are step-by-step instructions to delete a line:

    Press the Esc key to go to normal mode.
    Place the cursor on the line you want to delete.
    Type  dd  and hit Enter to remove the line.

Pressing dd multiple times will delete multiple lines.
Deleting Multiple Lines

To delete multiple lines at once, prepend the dd command with the number of lines to be deleted. For example, to delete five lines you would do the following:

    Press the Esc key to go to normal mode.
    Place the cursor on the first line you want to delete.
    Type  5dd  and hit Enter to delete the next five lines.

Delete a range of lines

The syntax for deleting a range of lines is as follows:

  :[start],[end]d 

For example, to delete lines starting from 3 to 5 you would do the following:

    Press the Esc key to go to normal mode.
    Type  :3,5d  and hit Enter to delete the lines.

You can also use the following characters to specify the range:

    . (dot) - The current line.
    $ - The last line.
    % - All lines.

Here are a few examples:

    :.,$d - From the current line to the end of the file.
    :.,1d - From the current line to the beginning of the file.
    :10,$d - From the 10th line to the end of the file.

Delete All Lines

To delete all line you can use either the % symbol that represents all lines or the 1,$ range:

    Press the Esc key to go to normal mode.
    Type   :%d  and hit Enter to delete all the lines.

Deleting Lines Containing a Pattern

The syntax for deleting multiple lines based on a specific pattern is as follows:


 :g/<pattern>/d 

The global command (g) tells the delete command (d) to delete all lines containing the <pattern>.

To match the lines not matching the pattern, add an exclamation mark (!) before the pattern:

 :g!/<pattern>/d

The pattern can be a literal match or regular expression . Below are some examples:

     :g/foo/d  - Delete all lines containing the string “foo”. It also removes line where “foo” is embedded in larger words, such as “football”.
    :g!/foo/d - Delete all lines not containing the string “foo”.
    :g/^#/d - Remove all comments from a Bash script. The pattern ^# means each line beginning with #.
    :g/^$/d - Remove all blank lines. The pattern ^$ matches all empty lines.
    :g/^\s*$/d - Remove all blank lines. Unlike the previous command, this also removes the blank lines that have zero or more whitespace characters (\s*).