For example, to delete all lines containing "profile" (remove the /d to show the lines that the command will delete): :g/profile/d More complex patterns can be used, such as deleting all lines that are empty or that contain only whitespace: :g/^\s*$/d To delete all lines that do not contain a pattern, use g!, like this command to delete all lines that are not comment lines in a Vim script: :g!/^\s*"/d Note that g! is equivalent to v, so you could also do the above with: :v/^\s*"/d help pattern]): :v/error\|warn\|fail/d