Question

My document looks something like this:

Line number one

Line number two

Line number three

I want the whole document to look like this:

Line number one
Line number two
Line number three

In other words, to remove all the empty lines. How to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Try :g/^$/d, which will remove all blank lines. The g indicates global, the ^$ is a regular expression that basically means ‘match lines that start and end with nothing in between’, and the d means delete. You can mix and match as much as you need 🙂

Another space-related command that may come in handy if you have random whitespace is :%s/\s\+$//, which trims any trailing whitespace (as @Bernhard points out, the $ operator means that you have a max of one occurrence per line, so the g is unnecessary).

Per the update, possible that the lines already contain whitespace, in which case :g/^\s*$/d should work.