I have textfiles with linebreaks.
I want to throw some of them away with search and replace function in kwrite or Kate or another editor.

I don't find any way to do this and nothing on google

Can anyone help?

"Or another editor", huh?

Ok, how about vi?

If by "linebreak" you mean the line feed that's at the end of every line, just go to the line whose ending line feed you want to eliminate, and use the J command (upper case jay) to combine that line with the next line.

On the other hand, if by "linebreak" you mean a line that contains no characters, you can search for such a line by searching for

If you want to delete that blank line, make sure you're still on that line, and use the same J command. Then use the n command (lower case en) to go to the next empty line.

Rinse. Repeat.

If you're new to vi, google for

You'll get a wealth of information.

Hope this helps.

Now you'r teasing - almost 30 years ago I was officially introduced to vi - and I proved to be virtually immune to this.

The idea was to to be able to quickly remove a lot of linefeed characters from a long piece of text.
Most often you would want to remove all but the double ones denoting paragraph breaks. This is a task that is often needed when for instance you receive som text on email and want to include it some other place where the length of the lines don't fit.

It is much much faster to use a search and replace function than to manually navigate around and delete.

I found out that you can do this in editpad, which is developed for windows, but there is a linux version. There you can copy a linefeed, paste it into the search box and then rush through the text replacing and skipping as needed.

sed - maybe start your education here.

Thanks - a really good tutorial - starting from the beginning - the thing with newlines comes at the very end of part 3, which I don't see any links to, but changing the numbers in the web address did the trick. Also very useful - though I don't see that it is possible to use it interactively

will this helps you,

vim filename

:g/\n/s//replaceword/gc

This will ask interactively y/n for replacing it.

Well I would advise vim.

Here is a oneliner to not exactly do what you want, it removes empty lines if they are 2 or above but leaves one.

<ESC>%s/\n{3,}/\r\r/e

I also dislike trailing spaces and once I turned on trailing space highlighting I noticed it all over the place.

<ESC>%s/\s*$//ge

to turn on trailing space detection:

hi TrailingEOL ctermbg=DarkGrey

nb. if you are using DarkGrey as your background this won't work

I like to call both the remove more than one line spacing and remove trailing spaces with the click of one button.

So I use a function in a vim resource file.

and map it to F5

You guys are really persistent - VI is tracking me down;-) (in the reinkarnation of VIM)

I have tried to teach myself. Here is a funny step by step guide that I found useful:
http://www.vi-improved.org/tutorial.php

My vim seems debile though. Entering the suggested command does start an interactive replace function, with this:

replace with replaceword (y/n/a/q/l/^E/^Y)

in the bottom. But it only accepts y for an answer (pretty clever, hu). Other answers makes nothing happen - it doesn't continue with other answers but y and a, which have the same effenct as y. As a bit of consolation it only replaces every second newline in the file (every time you run it).

It looked promising, but something is rotten here.
I also tried the GUI version, this also have the function in the GUI and it accepts \n as a newline search and it does highlight all the newlines in the file, but it cannot delete or replace them. This is version 7.0.30

That's because vi/vim is a really powerful editor - you can get a lot done and very quickly. A friend of mine uses nothing BUT vim to edit text and he can edit stuff way faster than I can in any other text editor (command line or not). It's not a difference in typing speed or anything like that, it's just that vim is that versatile and will allow you to get more done.

In fact, where I go to school you are not allowed to use anything other than vim or emacs as a text editor. There's a reason for that

Cheers.

By the way - I found that Gedit does the newline interactive search and replace just fine.

Can you confirm that your VIM can do it too? So I can be assured that it is mine that is defunct