Question

In technical papers typeset with latex we typically use a lot of “vspace” tricks to get the paper to lay out properly within the page limit. Of course, when the font or number of columns changes, they all break. What is a good way to replace all instances of items like this:

\vspace{3.4mm}
\vspace{2in}
\vspace{-1.2in}
\vspace{-3mm}

with

\vspace{0mm}

using a vim pattern?

Answer 1

%s/vspace{[^}]\+}/vspace{0mm}/g

key:

• %: search for pattern on all lines in file.
• vspace{[^}]\+}: search for “vspace{1 or more of any character except '}'}”