How to Remove Line Breaks in Sublime Text & Vim / Neovim

Why Developers Struggle with Line Joins Across Different Editors

When text is copied into an editor from a PDF document, an SSH terminal output, or an email client, line wraps break sentences into awkward 70-character fragments.

Cleaning this up manually by placing the cursor at the end of every line, pressing Delete, and typing a space is agonizingly slow. Modern professional editors give you specialized commands to perform line joining automatically. However, each editor implements line joining with subtle behavioral differences:

• Automatic Whitespace Adjustment: Does the editor preserve indentation, delete leading spaces on wrapped lines, or insert a single clean space between joined words?
• Modal vs. Non-Modal Execution: In Sublime Text, joining operates on highlighted ranges or active cursors. In Vim, joining is a modal command executed from Normal mode, Visual mode, or through the Ex command line.
• Regex Dialect Inconsistencies: In Sublime Text, standard PCRE rules apply (\n matches and replaces as expected). In Vim, the newline symbol \n works during pattern search, but behaves as a null byte in replacement patterns, where \r must be used instead.

Part 1: Removing Line Breaks in Sublime Text

1. The Built-in Join Lines Command

Sublime Text includes one of the most intelligent line joining routines among modern text editors. When you invoke Join Lines, Sublime Text does not merely delete the newline byte; it automatically strips leading indentation from the wrapped line and inserts a single space, preventing awkward character collisions.

1. Highlight the lines of text you wish to combine. (If no text is highlighted, the command joins the current line with the line immediately below).
2. Press Ctrl + J on Windows and Linux, or Cmd + J on macOS.
3. Alternatively, access the command from the menu: Edit → Line → Join Lines.

2. Find & Replace with Regular Expressions

If your document spans thousands of lines and contains multiple paragraphs that you want to clean across the entire file:

1. Press Ctrl + H (Cmd + Alt + F on Mac) to open the Replace panel.
2. Ensure Regular Expression mode is active by clicking the .* icon on the far left or pressing Alt + R.
3. In the Find field, type: \n (or \r?\n for Windows files).
4. In the Replace field, press the Spacebar once to type a single space.
5. Click Replace All.

3. Smart Paragraph Preservation in Sublime Text

If you want to remove soft line wraps within sentences but protect true paragraph separations (double line breaks), use PCRE negative lookarounds in Sublime Text's regex panel:

Find:    (?<!\n)\n(?!\n)
Replace:  (a single space)

This pattern says: "Find a newline character only if it is NOT preceded by another newline, and NOT followed by another newline." Consequently, isolated line wraps are converted to spaces, while double returns (\n\n) remain completely untouched!

Part 2: Removing Line Breaks in Vim & Neovim

1. Normal Mode & Visual Mode Joins

Vim provides dedicated single-keystroke commands for joining lines in Normal mode:

• Press J (Shift + J): Joins the current line with the line below, deleting leading whitespace and inserting a single space. (If the first line ends with a period, Vim may insert two spaces depending on your 'joinspaces' setting).
• Press g J: Joins the lines without adding any space whatsoever. This is crucial when joining strings, URLs, or code tokens that were artificially wrapped.
• Numeric Multipliers (e.g., 5 J): Joins the next 5 lines together in one rapid motion.

2. Visual Mode Range Joining

To join a continuous block of lines:

1. Press V (Shift + V) to enter Visual Line selection mode.
2. Use j or k (or } to jump to paragraph end) to select the desired lines.
3. Press J to join all highlighted lines with single spaces, or gJ to join with no spaces.

3. Global Buffer Substitution with Ex Commands

To strip newlines across the entire buffer without selecting text, switch to command mode by pressing ::

" Replace every newline in the file with a single space
:%s/\n/ /g

" Join all lines in the file with no spaces at all
:%s/\n//g

4. Preserving Paragraphs in Vim with the :v Command

Vim's :v (inverted global) command executes an action on every line that does not match a given pattern. We can use this to join lines across an entire document while leaving blank lines between paragraphs intact:

" Join non-empty lines while preserving blank paragraph breaks
:v/^$/join

Here, ^$ matches empty lines. The :v prefix runs join on all lines that are not empty, merging wrapped sentences while stopping at paragraph dividers.

Sublime Text vs. Vim Command Cheatsheet

Pre-Edit Checklist for Editors

• Selection Checked: Before hitting Ctrl+J in Sublime Text, verify whether you highlighted the intended block; otherwise, it will join only the active line with the line beneath it.
• Regex Mode Verified: In Sublime Text, verify that the .* icon in the Find panel is highlighted; otherwise, \n will be searched as literal backslash and 'n'.
• Vim Substitution Checked: When running :%s/\n/ /g, check if your file contains Windows carriage returns (\r\n). If so, run :set ff=unix first to clean line formats.
• Undo Safety Net: In Vim, press u to undo immediately if a substitution behaves unexpectedly; in Sublime Text, press Ctrl+Z.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore Related Tools & Tutorials