How to Remove Empty Lines in VS Code

If you’ve ever come across a file in VS Code that has multiple empty lines that you want to remove all at once, you’re in luck. Manually removing them one by one can be quite tedious, especially if you’re dealing with a large number of empty lines.

As a programmer, you’ll probably prefer spending a few minutes to find a more efficient solution rather than wasting time on a repetitive and mundane task.

After some research, I discovered a simple method to remove empty lines in VS Code. All you need to do is use the replace feature and replace \n\n (two consecutive newline characters) with \n (a single newline character).

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Open the file in VS Code that contains the empty lines you wish to remove.
2. Press Ctrl + H (Windows) or Command + H (Mac) to open the replace dialog box.
3. In the “Find” field, enter \n\n.
4. In the “Replace” field, enter \n.
5. Click on the “Replace All” button to remove all the empty lines at once.

If you still have more empty lines left after the first replacement, you can repeat the “Replace All” operation until you have just one empty line remaining.

Update:
If you want to remove all the empty lines in one go without having to repeat the operation multiple times, you can use the regular expression \n\n+ in the find field. This will match one or more consecutive empty lines, allowing you to remove them all with a single “Replace All” action.

By following these simple steps, you can quickly and efficiently remove empty lines from your files in VS Code, saving you valuable time and effort.

tags: [“VS Code”, “empty lines”, “text editing”, “replace feature”]