On older versions of Micro$oft Works there was a useful function called "Reflow" that removed unnecessary line breaks and tabs from a paragraph. It was needed because word-wrapping was still in its infancy at the time and after multiple edits, a paragraph would have some lines that were really short, others really long, and unneeded line breaks.


e.g. it would turn a paragraph
like this into
a nice paragraph like the
one
above.


What I want to be able to do is make Vim fix this for me. I import a lot of DOS-format text files into Vim, and I have a large collection of files that were created in GUI text editors. Both look terrible when I view them with Vim because they have all kinds of line breaks and such.

Anyone know how to do this?

I'm not sure how you'd do this in vim, but the "fmt" command should work for you.

Lyle

Thanks for the tip. This command will work for what I need, although I still wish it were in Vim.

Position the cursor at the beginning of the paragraph and type

gqap

To remove returns, something like

:g/^M/s///g

might do. (The ^M is actually created by typing 'ctrl-V' and then hitting return.)

The builtin vim help and Google are great. I'm still figuring vim out and probably always will be.

wow.... thanks!
that works like a charm.
i think i'll have to associate that to a key combo for quick access.