Deleting specific patterns without deleting the whole lines

Question

Say I want to remove all comment blocks in my source code without deleting the whole lines they are on. It's possible to achieve this using the

:%s/\/\*.*\*\//

command. I was wondering, is there a specific delete command for this, or is replacing the matched pattern the best approach? The difference most likely wouldn't be much, I'm just curious.

Answer 1

Replacing with nothing really is the idiomatic 'delete this pattern' operation.

:%s/pattern//g

If you want to blank all lines that contain a pattern, like in your example, the obvious solution is to add wildcard matches around the pattern.

:%s/.*pattern.*//

An alternative is to use :global with a normal mode or Ex command. These two achieve the same thing:

:g/pattern/normal! S
:g/pattern/delete|put! _

By the way, while I don't recommend using abbreviated command names in scripts or in code that other people might see, I think it's fine to use them interactively. Thus I tend to abbreviate such commands as :g/pattern/norm! S and :g/pattern/d|pu!_.