Regex to delete all leading blank lines

Question

Is there a Vim regex to delete all leading blank lines in the file?

text
more text

some more text

Should become:

text
more text

some more text

Answer 1

The following should do the job:

:%s/\%^\_\s*\n//

Here is an explanation:

• \%^ match the beginning of the file
• \_\s match any space character including new line
• * repeat the match
• \n match the last new line

I include the \n to not match the leading space on the first non white-space line (line that that is only made of white-spaces)

Remark: If by blank line you mean empty line the regex is more simple:

:%s/\%^\n*//

Answer 2

Probably the most concise way to do this is with a range and the :delete command:

:1,/\S/-1d
             # Explanation
             # -----------
         d   # Delete all the lines
:1,          # in the range that starts at the beginning of the file
       -1    # and ends one line before
   /\S/      # the first line containing a non-whitespace character

If you don't want to delete whitespace-only lines it's even shorter:

:1,/./-1d

        d   # Delete all the lines
:1,         # in the range that starts at the beginning of the file
      -1    # and ends one line before
   /./      # the first line containing anything

Answer 3

This is the method I use:

:g/^$/d

Answer 4

On the off chance that one or more of the lines isn't exactly blank, but contains whitespace, this variant on @mas answer works:

:g/^\s*$/d

You asked about leading blank lines. That implies to me that you don't want to delete any lines that come either between text-containing lines or after them. If that's the case, you want to put a range between the : and the g. In your sample's case, where it appears to me there are two blank lines, it'd look like:

:1,2g/^\s*$/d