Delete all lines containing a pattern
From Vim Tips Wiki
Tip 213 Previous Next created February 10, 2002 · complexity basic · author tarjei · version 5.7
The ex command g is very useful for acting on lines that match a pattern. You can use it with the d command, to delete all lines that contain a particular pattern, or all lines that do not contain a pattern.
For example, to delete all lines containing "profile" (the first command is optional; it shows the lines that the second command will delete):
:g/profile :g/profile/d
More complex patterns can be used, such as deleting all lines that are empty or that contain only whitespace:
:g/^\s*$/d
To delete all lines that do not contain a pattern, use g!, like this command to delete all lines that are not comment lines in a Vim script:
:g!/^\s*"/d
Note that g! is equivalent to v, so you could also do the above with:
:v/^\s*"/d
The next example shows use of \| ("or") to delete all lines except those that contain "error" or "warn" or "fail" (:help pattern):
:v/error\|warn\|fail/d
