Something that I found out last night at the Vim London Meetup that was demonstrated by Drew Neil was the ability to delete lines in your file that don’t match a particular pattern. All credit for this tip goes to Drew – I’m just typing it up on here!

Say we have a file that has lines that look a bit like this (I had to do this earlier today):

calculate
something_else
calculate
something_else
calculate
something_else
calculate
some_other_thing
calculate
some_more_things
calculate
some_other_things
something_else
something_else

And we want to delete all lines that don’t contain calculate. We can do that with :v. Simply running:

:v/calculate/d

Leaves me with:

calculate
calculate
calculate
calculate
calculate
calculate

This is part of the :global command.

Thanks again to Drew for demonstrating this! If you’re London based, I highly recommend making an effort to attend the meetups. They are completely free and I never come away from one without at least one new trick or tip that improves my usage of Vim.