Delete whitespace before and after word

Question

I have some text with two dashes:

This is some text -- with two dashes.

I want to delete the space before and after the dashes:

This is some text--with two dashes.

Is there a way this can be done without simply pressing x on each space?

I thought maybe vim-surround works with spaces, so I tried ds<Space>, but it didn't work.

Answer 1

I'd go for a substitution:

:%s/ \+-- \+/--/gc

With g flag to be executed globally on the lines (not only first occurrence per line) and c to confirm (to make sure it does not change things you did not want)

Answer 2

vim-surround by tpope on github

I have tried following undocumented feature of vim-surround

ds<space><space>

and it worked for me.

This has been added in commit Support ds<space><space> (7 Aug 2015 ). This commit was added after the release of version 2.1 (2015-02-08) which is currently the newest version on vim.org. Therefore, this feature is only available if you have pulled in a newer version from github. Most plugin manager, e.g. vim-plug or minpac, do this anyway.

BTW, there is an alternative plugin vim-sandwich which supports this as well (here by default sd<space>).