What is an elegant way to delete until the first line?

Question

I know that I can delete until the first character with dgg or until line 1 with d1 Shift-G.

But I would prefer something conceptually elegant if possible.

I guess I can easily just remap a single key to d2 Shift-G, but I’m still not clear on how you find or decide what key to map to, in case you overwrite something important.

Is there any syntax of Vim native built-ins which possibly says:

“Delete until the line one beneath the first”.

For example, maybe there is something I could add between d and gg which says “+1” wherever you are going?

Or is there a special code like gg but for the second line?

Thank you

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is the following command:

:2,.d

The 2,. is the range on which d is applied it goes from the second line to the current line (.)

And you can map that to whatever you want:

nnoremap <leader>d :2,.d<CR>

Answer 2

When I delete large amount of lines, I generally prefer to first do a selection and then delete the selection.

So first I start the selection and would go to the top of the file: vgg

Then I'd move to the first line I want to delete with arrow keys.

Finally, I'd hit either d or D to delete what is selected, or all the lines selected.

If I were to need to do that many times, I'd create a macro

qa<type your sequence of commands>q

To then apply the macro you do:

@a

You can repeat the last macro you used with:

@@

As for which keys to remap, I don't use many remapped commands, but I have them on my F2 to F12 keys. Those are not used by vim anyway. For example, to write the signature in a Debian changelog file, I use F5:

map <F5> 0C -- Alexis Wilke <[email protected]>  <C-R>=strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z")<CR><Esc>