Delete whitespace for a set of lines in Vim editor

Question

I have some text like the following in a file:

  sample text
    some random text
            even more random text
text with no indent
 worst indention

I need to delete the empty space before each of the lines. For one line what I do is 0dw

I can repeat the same command using . but by manually navigating to the next lines.

But is there a way to apply '0dw' to those block of lines?

I suppose there is a way using macros, but I haven't used them before. But I am willing to learn them if ther is no other choice.

Answer 1

:%s/^\s\+
" Same thing (:le = :left = left-align given range):
:%le

Learn more here at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Remove_unwanted_spaces

If you want to do this for a particular range of lines:

:19,25s/^\s\+//

BTW, best way to start learning vim is to execute vimtutor command, it will teach you how to use Vim in Vim editor.

Answer 2

An alternate way to do this is to use VIM's indentation tools (usually bound to < / >). First you need some way to indicate which lines will be affected. You can use the visual selection mode or any other means of specifying a range of lines to be affected, then use an arbitrarily high number or indentation levels to remove. 9< usually does the trick quite nicely to remove at least 9 levels of possible indentation (tabs/spaces) from the current line(s).

Answer 3

I have got approach to do this in the simple following steps:

1. press `v` to go to visual selection mode
2. select the lines you want to affect
3. :'<,'>normal 0dw

Explanation of the third step:

0 navigates to start of line.

dw deletes the word (empty spaces).

normal applies the command 0dw.

'<,'> repeats the normal for all selected lines in visual mode.

Answer 4

ctrl+v allows you to do something similar to what you want but not exactly. You can select a visual block and apply one command to the lot.