deleteto.vim

Introduction

DeleteTo reads a character from the user, then deletes from the beginning of the line up to and including that character.

DeleteUntil is similar, but deletes up to and not including the character. This is analogous to Vim's f vs t motions.

If you have a tab delimited file, dU<Tab> will delete the first column of data.

See the Workflow section, below, to see what that means.

To improve this plugin, I recommend installing Tim Pope's vim-repeat plugin.

Workflow

Imagine you're working with a list of files:

./deleteto/plugin/deleteto.vim
./deleteto/README.md
./keyword/plugin/keyword.vim
./keyword/README.md

but you'd like a tidier list without the ./ at the beginning. Type: dU/

deleteto/plugin/deleteto.vim
deleteto/README.md
keyword/plugin/keyword.vim
keyword/README.md

Type dU/ again

plugin/deleteto.vim
README.md
plugin/keyword.vim
README.md

Mappings

By default, DeleteTo creates four mappings:

Type	To work on	Calls
dU	All lines	<Plug>DeleteToA
duu	This line	<Plug>DeleteToL
du{motion}	Motion-defined	<Plug>DeleteToM
{visual}du	Visual region	<Plug>DeleteToV

You can disable the default mappings with:

let g:deleteto_create_mappings = 0

DeleteUntil does not create default mappings to avoid conflicts with built-in Vim commands. The following <Plug> targets are available:

Plug target	To work on
<Plug>DeleteUntilA	All lines
<Plug>DeleteUntilL	This line
<Plug>DeleteUntilM	Motion-defined
<Plug>DeleteUntilV	Visual region

Suggested mappings (add to your vimrc):

nmap dI  <Plug>DeleteUntilA
nmap dii <Plug>DeleteUntilL
nmap di  <Plug>DeleteUntilM
xmap di  <Plug>DeleteUntilV

Commands

The commands have the form

:[range]DeleteTo CHAR [COUNT]
:[range]DeleteUntil CHAR [COUNT]

DeleteTo deletes including the delimiter character. DeleteUntil deletes up to but not including the delimiter character.

Examples

The delimiter will commonly be forward slash, space, comma or tab. However, DeleteTo will work with any character, including multi-byte characters.

Type this	Works on	Delete up to this character
dU/	Whole file	First /
3dU,	Whole file	Third ,
4duu/	One line	Fourth /
vip2du<Tab>	Visual - paragraph	Second <Tab>
du9j,	Motion - 10 lines	First ,
:DeleteTo /	Whole file	First /
:1,20DeleteTo /	Lines 1-20	First /
:DeleteTo , 4	Whole file	Fourth ,
:argdo DeleteTo / 2	All args, all lines	Second /
`:bufdo DeleteTo	`	All buffers, all lines

DeleteUntil (exclusive)

Given the line: a/b/c/d

Command	Result	Deleted
:DeleteUntil /	/b/c/d	a
:DeleteUntil / 2	/c/d	a/b
:DeleteUntil / 3	/d	a/b/c

Options

Yank deleted text

By default, DeleteTo uses :substitute internally, so the deleted text is not placed into any register. This differs from Vim's built-in d command.

To yank the deleted text into the unnamed register, set:

let g:deleteto_yank = 1

This applies to both DeleteTo and DeleteUntil. The deleted text from all affected lines is joined with newlines and placed in the unnamed register, so you can paste it with p.

License

Copyright © 2014-2026 Richard Russon (flatcap). Distributed under the GPLv3 http://fsf.org/

See also

• flatcap.org
• GitHub