The Vim Global Command

There are several modes inside of Vim (and Neovim). Each has a special purpose and use cases. The global command is one that can be very powerful for performing operations across a matched pattern. I’ll walk you through a few examples so you can start using the global command in your workflows.

The general idea is to use the below example to match some text in a buffer and then perform an operation on all matches.

Example:
:g/pattern/command

Delete Matching Lines

Let’s start with a basic example of deleting a bunch of lines in a file.

If you had the word “error” in a few places then you could you this g command to delete all lines that match.

:g/error/d
Deletes all lines matching error

Pretty straight forward, what about if you wanted to delete all the lines that did NOT have “error” in them?

Delete Non-Matching Lines

You can use almost the same command but instead use a g! instead of just g. This will invert the match and grab all lines that do NOT match.

:g!/error/d
Deletes all lines not matching error.