Question

I am writing a long document and I am frequently formatting some terms to italics. After some time I realized that maybe that is now what I want so I would like to remove all the latex commands that format text to italics.

Example:

\textit{Vim} is undoubtedly one of the best editors ever made. \textit{LaTeX} is an extremely powerful, intelligent typesetter. \textbd{Vim-LaTeX} aims at bringing together the best of both these worlds

How can I run a substitution command that recognizes all the instances of \textit{whatever} and changes them to just whatever without affecting different commands such as \textbd{Vim-LaTeX} in this example?

EDIT: As technically the answer that helps is the one from Igor I will mark that one as the correct one. Nevertheless, Konrad’s answer should be taken into account as it shows the proper Latex strategy to follow.

Answer 1

Use this substitution command:

% s/\\textit{\([^}]*\)}/\1/

If textit can span muptiple lines:

%! perl -e 'local $/; $_=<>; s/\\textit{([^}]*)}/$1/g; print;'

And you can do this without perl also:

%s/\\textit{\(\_.\{-}\)}/\1/g

Here:

• \_. — any symbol including a newline character
• \{-} — make * non-greedy.