Delete first n characters in a file : Vim Trick

There are times when you need to manipulate BIG text files. Today going through syslog, i had to deleted first few characters ( date and time) to get a better understanding of my log files. Vim is so cool this can be done in fraction of second with just these few characters.

:%s/^.\{n}/

Substitute n with number of characters you want to delete.

:s/<search for>/<replace with>

will replace first occurrence of “search for” with “replace with”, so if you leave “replace with” blank it will basically delete first occurrence of “search for”

Dissecting Command

:s is a vim command for substitution.

% stands for each line.

^ – From first

. – regular expression, matches first character

Now what will this command do?

:%s/^./

For each line starting from first, this command will substitute first character with nothing(hence deletes first character)

Now you want this to be repeated for n characters

\{#\} is used for repetition. So,

:%s/^.\{n\}/

will do the magic.

You need not escape closing bracket ‘}’ so this also works

:%s/^.\{n}/

removing % will delete first n characters in current line

Source : Vim Search and Replace

• delete
• first n characters
• replace
• search
• text manipulation
• vim
• vim tricks