Advent of Vim: Delete matching lines

After the last two days, let’s see a less brain melting, but related topic, how to remove lines with given pattern from a file.

It’s not something I use daily, but with rust code, I use it a lot. Around tests, sometimes there are #[ignore lines to tell the system to ignore this test function. When I’m done I want to remove all of those from the test file, and the easiest way to use vim.

The :global command executed an Ex (: commands) command on the lines within the provided range that matches a pattern. In this case we want to run d on all lines that matches ^#\[ignore, so the command will be :g/^#\[ignore/d. That d is not a regular expression flag there, it’s a command.

But we can do it better, we don’t want those lines to be on our clipboard, and luckily :delete has an optional argument for the target register.

:[range]d[elete] [x]  Delete [range] lines (default: current line)
                      [into register x].

That’s perfect, we can use the _ “spam” register to keep all our registers clean. Our final command will be :g/^\[ignore/d _.