vim - How to delete a large block of text without counting the lines

Question

In vim  I often find myself deleting  or copying  large blocks of text  One can count the lines of text and say  for example  50dd to delete 50 lines    But how would one delete this large block of text without having to know how many lines to delete

User · Answer

If the entire block is visible on the screen  you can use relativenumber setting  See  help relativenumber  Available in 7 3

User · Answer

I m no vim guru  but what I use in this circumstance is  visual mode   In command mode  type V  capital   Then move up down to highlight the block you want deleted  all the usual movement commands work   Then remove it with x or d

User · Answer

There are several possibilities  what s best depends on the text you work on    Two possibilities come to mind    switch to visual mode  V  S-V        select the text with cursor movement and press d delete a whole paragraph with  dap

User · Answer

Go to the starting line and type ma  mark  a    Then go to the last line and enter d a  delete to mark  a     That will delete all lines from the current to the marked one  inclusive   It s also compatible with vi as well as vim  on the off chance that your environment is not blessed with the latter

User · Answer

Alongside with other motions that are already mentioned here  there is also   pattern  lt CR gt  motion  so if you know that you want to delete to line that contains foo  you could do dV foo lt CR gt   V is here to force motion be line-wise because by default   is characterwise

User · Answer

Deleting a block of text  Assuming your cursor sits at the beginning of the block   V    lt CR gt d  where  lt CR gt  is the enter return key    Explanation   Enter  linewise-visual  mode  V Highlight until the next empty line      lt CR gt  Delete  d   Key binding  A more robust solution    set nowrapscan  nnoremap D V   s         lt CR gt d   Explanation   Disable search wrap   set nowrapscan Remap the D key  to the following commands    nnoremap D Enter  linewise-visual  mode  V Highlight until the next empty whitespace line or EOF     s         lt CR gt  Delete  d

User · Answer

If you turn on line numbers via set number you can simply dNNG which will delete to line NN from the current position  So you can navigate to the start of the line you wish to delete and simply d50G assuming that is the last line you wish to delete

User · Answer

You can use the visual mode also  some commands are usable with the delete option also  vip vap to select paragraph  v2ap to select two paragraphs  dap works  d2ap also  You can delete within blocks of     like da    For reference  the types of objects  From vim documentation   section 4  http   vimdoc sourceforge net htmldoc visual html  4  Operating on the Visual area              visual-operators           The objects that can be used are  aw  a word  with white space             iw  inner word                   aW  a WORD  with white space             iW  inner WORD                   as  a sentence  with white space             is  inner sentence                   ap  a paragraph  with white space            ip  inner paragraph                  ab  a    block  with parenthesis             ib  inner    block                   aB  a    block  with braces              iB  inner    block                   a lt   a  lt  gt  block  with  lt  gt                   i lt   inner  lt  gt  block                   a   a    block  with                     i   inner    block

User · Answer

It sort of depends on what that large block is  Maybe you just mean to delete a paragraph in which case a dip would do

User · Answer

You could place your cursor at the beginning or end of the block and enter visual mode  shift-v   Then simply move up or down until the desired block is highlighted  Finally  copy the text by pressing y or cut the text by pressing d

User · Answer

There are many better answers here  but for completeness I will mention the method I used to use before reading some of the great answers mentioned above   Suppose you want to delete from lines 24-39  You can use the ex command   24 39d   You can also yank lines using   24 39y   And find and replace just over lines 24-39 using   24 39s find replace g

User · Answer

Counting lines is too tedious for me  but counting  paragraphs  isn t so bad      and     move the cursor to the first empty line before and after the cursor  respectively  Cursor moving operations can be combined with deletion  and several other answers used a similar approach  dd for a line  dG for the end of the document  etc     For example      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet  consectetur adipiscing elit      Lorem  ipsum void      return dolor sit  amet       If your cursor starts above the comment block   d   deletes the comment block  and  d2   deletes both the comment block and the code block  If your cursor starts below the code block   d   deletes the code  and  d2   deletes both  Of course  you can skip over one block by moving the cursor first    d   or   d     If you re consistent with your whitespace  or you can count the paragraphs at a glance  this should work  The Vim help file has more cursor tricks if you re interested

User · Answer

You can also enter a very large number  and then press dd if you wish to delete all the lines below the cursor

[vim] vim - How to delete a large block of text without counting the lines?

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