How to Vim: Joining Lines

Joining adjacent lines is something that comes up often while editing text/code. That’s why it should come as no surprise that this is something well supported by Vim. You have two ways to join lines at your disposal:

• Using J joins lines with a space between each line
• Using gJ joins lines without a space between each line

If you use the commands by themselves they are going to join the current line with the line after it, but like usual in Vim the real magic happens when you operate on some range of lines or text objects:

• 5J will join the next 5 lines
• vipJ will select the current paragraph in visual mode and join all the lines there

In general I think that when it comes to joining multiple lines visual mode makes a lot of sense, as you’re pretty clear up front what you’re about to join.

There a few more nuances to joining lines, especially if you’re using :join instead of J, but I think that few people need to know of those. For the curious readers there’s always :help J to learn more on the topic.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!