How would I move the current line behind the line above it? Say I

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Asked: May 26, 20262026-05-26T13:30:08+00:00 2026-05-26T13:30:08+00:00

How would I move the current line behind the line above it? Say I have:

    function foo()
      {
      ^ Cursor is here

And want to turn that into:

function foo() {

I am still new to vim, so what I do now is i[backspace][backspace]...etc. 🙂

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-26T13:30:09+00:00

Several ways:

In normal mode, kJ or kgJ or VkJ or VkgJ (the last two commands do the same in visual mode).
k will go to previous line, and J or gJ will merge with next line (J inserts a space inbetween, gJ just removes the EOL characters)
In command mode, :-,j or :-,j!
-, is a range that is abbreviation for .-1,. which means “from previous line to current line”
j is the ex command for concatenating lines in a range. The banged (with exclamation mark) version acts like gJ.
With a substitution: :-s/\s*\n\s*//
- means previous line
:s is probably known to you, else you should run vimtutor.
/\s*\n\s*/ is pattern for as many spaces as possible plus line terminator (matches different byte sequences according to the file format: LF, CR or CRLF) plus as many spaces as possible.
Here, replacement pattern is empty.
in insert mode, hit CTRL-W twice (each time it deletes a word, or leading whitespace on a line, or newline) (as ib. suggests, this depends on the backspace setting).

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