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FLAVIO COPES
flaviocopes.com
2026

How to remove empty lines in VS Code

By Flavio Copes

Learn how to remove hundreds of empty lines in VS Code at once using regex find and replace, matching repeated newlines and collapsing them to a single one.

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I recently had to work with a file, in VS Code, that had several empty lines I wanted to remove all at once.

We’re talking about 700+ empty lines with some text in between, and I didn’t want to do this manually.

I’m a programmer, so I’d rather spend 5 minutes making a task easier rather than spend the same amount of time doing an annoying job.

I searched a bit and found this simple way to do so: replace \n\n with \n.

Remove empty lines in VS Code

I ran “replace all” inside the file, and half of the lines were removed. So I ran it again, and again and again, until I got to 1 empty line.

Update: \n\n+ will replace all lines at once without having to repeat the operation

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