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What does it mean to remove unwanted space in Vim?
The following is a more elaborate procedure that can display or remove unwanted whitespace. Here, “unwanted” means any spaces before a tab character, or any space or tab at the end of a line.
How to highlight all white spaces in Vim?
Simply set set list listchars+=space:␣ This works as of Vim 7.4.711 to highlight white spaces. It searches for all white spaces, and then enables the highlight to make them pop out. However, it does not print a special character. If by whitespaces you mean the ‘ ‘ character, my suggestion would just be a search/replace.
How can I convert spaces to tabs in Vim or Linux?
Note that this will only replace the spaces preceding the prescribed tab stops, not the spaces that follow them; you will see no visual difference in vim unless you display tabs more literally; for example, my ~/.vimrc contains set list listchars=tab:▸┈ (I suspect this is why you thought unexpand didn’t work).
How to substitute multiple spaces in Vim regex?
The command to execute happens to be s in this case so there’s no real difference but, if you want to become a vi power user, you should look into :g at some point. Many substitutions can be done in Vim easier than with other regex dialects by using the \\zs and \\ze meta-sequences.
How to remove or replace whitespace from file in vi editor?
Re: how to remove or replace whitespace from file in VI editor? White space is not just spaces, it also includes tabs (and in some programs like tr and awk, the whitespace concept includes the end of line character LF). Now the question is: do you want to delete all space and tab characters?
How do you delete blank lines in Vim?
In the second command, v operates on lines that do not match, and \\S matches anything that is not a whitespace, and d deletes the flagged lines (all lines that have no characters, or that have only whitespace characters). You may want to condense multiple blank lines into a single blank line.
How to remove or replace whitespace from file?
White space is not just spaces, it also includes tabs (and in some programs like tr and awk, the whitespace concept includes the end of line character LF). Now the question is: do you want to delete all space and tab characters? If so, just use tr like this: Redirect the output into a new file if you need to save the results.