Vim delete blank lines

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

This works for me

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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/^^^^.*

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

work with perl in vim:

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