Simplifying Drupal's default.settings.php file with Vim

February 12th, 2026

Drupal's default.settings.php file contains 804 commented lines, 45 blank lines and only 12 lines of code.

To remove the commented lines, I can run the following in Vim in command mode:

:g/^\s*[/*#]/d

This performs a global substitution on the current buffer, deleting lines that start with a comment character (ignoring spaces before it).

This will leave a number of blank lines, but that can be solved with another substitution:

:g/^\n\n/d

This finds and deletes pairs of blank lines, creating a much smaller and simpler file with no comments and only nine blank lines.