How to move current line behind the line above it in Vim?

Question

How would I move the current line behind the line above it? Say I have:

    function foo()
      {
      ^ Cursor is here

And want to turn that into:

function foo() {

I am still new to vim, so what I do now is i[backspace][backspace]...etc. :)

Answer 1

Several ways:

• In normal mode, kJ or kgJ or VkJ or VkgJ (the last two commands do the same in visual mode).
  k will go to previous line, and J or gJ will merge with next line (J inserts a space inbetween, gJ just removes the EOL characters)
• In command mode, :-,j or :-,j!
-, is a range that is abbreviation for .-1,. which means “from previous line to current line”
  j is the ex command for concatenating lines in a range. The banged (with exclamation mark) version acts like gJ.
• With a substitution: :-s/\s*\n\s*//
- means previous line
  :s is probably known to you, else you should run vimtutor. /\s*\n\s*/ is pattern for as many spaces as possible plus line terminator (matches different byte sequences according to the file format: LF, CR or CRLF) plus as many spaces as possible.
  Here, replacement pattern is empty.
• in insert mode, hit CTRL-W twice (each time it deletes a word, or leading whitespace on a line, or newline) (as ib. suggests, this depends on the backspace setting).

References:

• :help J
• :help gJ
• :help k
• :help range
• :help :j
• :help pattern
• :help i_CTRL-W