CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimtextline-breaks
haff
haff

Reputation: 956

Remove single line breaks but keep empty lines with Vim

Is it possible to remove single line breaks but to keep empty lines (double line breaks I guess?) in Vim? I'm using Vim's HardPencil plugin to do some word processing, and I like the hard line breaks because it makes it easier to bounce around the file. However, I need to share this information in LibreOffice Writer or Word, and hard line breaks won't work well if others edit the file. To clarify, this is what I have:

Line1.
Line2.
Line3.

Line4.
Line5.

And this is what I would like:

Line1. Line2. Line3.

Line4. Line5.

Essentially hard line breaks should be replaced with a space, and double line breaks should be preserved.

I've tried variations of :%s/\n but can't get the double line breaks to be preserved. I've found similar questions here and here, but these are not Vim specific.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 1801

Answers (2)

Peter Rincker
Peter Rincker

Reputation: 45117

Use gw (or gq) with a motion (like G).

gwG

gw is Vim's paragraph formatting operator which "reflows" text to the desired 'textwidth'. You may want to temporarily set 'textwidth' to 0 for unlimited text width (:set tw=0).

There some other ways as well do this as well:

  • Use :%!fmt- same idea as above but use fmt external tool and a filter.
  • :v/^$/,//-j - squeezes non-empty lines together. Fails if the end of the range does not have a blank line
  • :g/\v(.+\zs\n)+/,-//j - Also squeezes non-empty lines together, but avoids the range error of the previous method.
  • A substitution - See @Fabricator solution for an example

For more help see:

:h gw
:h operator
:h 'tw'
:h filter
:h :range!
:h :range
:h :v
:h :j
:h :g
:h magic
:h /\zs

Upvotes: 5

Fabricator
Fabricator

Reputation: 12772

You can replace line+line break with just line, and use negative look ahead \(\n\)\@! to make sure it's not followed by an empty line:

:%s/\(.\+\)\n\(\n\)\@!/\1 /

@Peter_Rincker's cleaner solution:

:%s/.\+\zs\n\ze./ /

Upvotes: 6

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