Vim is a popular command-line text editor that’s present on most Linux distros and macOS. Knowing how to use the editor can save you a lot of time when jumping about the terminal.

In this article, we’re taking a look at how you can delete lines in Vim through the following four guides.

• Deleting a single line in Vim
• Deleting multiple lines in Vim
• Deleting a range of lines in Vim
• Deleting lines with a pattern on Vim

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How to delete a line in Vim?

Step 1: Press Esc to go to Normal mode and place the cursor on the line you want to delete.

Step 2: Type dd to delete the line. Note that pressing dd multiple times will delete multiple lines. 

Also read: Mint vs Ubuntu: Linux distro comparison

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How to delete multiple lines in Vim?

You can prefix the number of lines you want to delete to the dd command to remove multiple lines at once. 

Step 1: Press Esc to go to Normal mode and place the cursor on the line you want to delete.

Step 2: Type 3dd and hit enter to delete three lines from the cursor’s position. You can replace the number with the number of lines you want to delete.

Also read: How to open task manager in Linux?

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How to delete a range of lines in Vim?

Use this syntax to remove a range of lines at the same time. 

:[start], [end]d

Step 1: Press Esc to go to Normal mode.

Step 2: Enter :4,10d to delete line 4 to 10. You can change these numbers as per your requirement. 

Here are a few characters you can use to specify ranges.

• . : Deletes the current line.
• $: Removes the last line.
• %: Removes all lines. 

For example, to delete all lines in a document, you’d simply use $d. 

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How to delete lines with a pattern in Vim?

Use the d command in the following syntax to delete lines with a pattern. 

:g/<pattern>/d

The syntax involves the global command (g) telling the delete command (d) to remove all lines including the <pattern>.

:g!/<pattern>/d

You can add an exclamation mark after the global command to only delete lines not matching the pattern. You can also specify expressions as a pattern. For example.

• :g/del/d: This command will delete all lines containing ‘del’, even if it’s embedded in larger words such as ‘delete’. 
• :g!/del/d: Does the exact opposite of the aforementioned command. Deletes all lines that don’t contain ‘del’.
• :g/^$/d: Deletes all blank lines, ^$ being the expression for empty lines.
• :g/^#/d: This command will remove all comments from a bash script as bash comments start with #.

Also read: How to use the Cat command in Linux?