Vim undoing text width formatting

formattinglibreofficenewlinesvim

I wrote a document in vim with textwidth=80. I would now like to paste this document into libreoffice for formatting. The problem is the line breaks. In libreoffice the lines are too short because of the newlines inserted by vim after 80 characters.

I separate paragraphs using two newline characters (i.e. hitting return twice). Is there any way I could remove all the single \n characters while retaining the \n\n characters?

Best Answer

Something like this

:%s/\(\S\)\n/\1
:%s/\n/&&

should work. Well, it does here.

The first substitution matches a "non-whitespace character" (it could be more specific) followed by a newline, capturing that "non-whitespace character" for use in the replacement (\1). Practically, it turns every "paragraph" into a single line.

The second one substitutes every newline character with two newline characters. & is used in the replacement to mean "the matched text" so, here && means "two newline characters". It could be written :%s/\n/\r\r but && is shorter.

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Perhaps you could try : gg=G to indent all the document ? I'm not sure it works good with HTML.

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I think this does what you want: make sure there is an empty line at the end of the file, then join every paragraph (terminated by an empty line).

G:a

.
:g/^./ .,/^$/-1 join

Explanation: first go to the end of the file and append an extra empty line with :a (maybe there's a more elegant way to do that; interactively, you can replace the first three lines with o<ESC>). Then, for every non-blank line that hasn't been considered yet (:g/^./), apply the join command to the range starting at the selected line (.) and ending one line before the next empty line (/^$/-1).

Optionally, :g/^$/d if you don't want any blank line to remain (then you can take off the -1).

Best Answer

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