Select entire line in VIM, without the new line character

No, there is nothing built-in that does the job. That's why people have even created plugins to address the need.

Probably the most popular choice is textobj-line. With textobj-line you get two new text objects, al "a line" and il "inner line". Then,

• vil selects the printable contents of the line (like ^vg_),
• val selects the entire line contents (like 0v$h).

Both do not include the newline in the selection.

Pretty handy plugin if you ask me. And it works with operators, too.

---

By request, the installation:

• With plain Vim:
  1. Get the latest textobj-user and extract its directories into ~/.vim.
  2. Get the latest textobj-line and extract its directories into ~/.vim.
  3. Generate the help tags :helptags ~/.vim/doc.
• With a plugin manager (recommended): just follow the usual installation procedure for your plugin manager, and don't forget to install the textobj-user dependency as well.

Yes, g_ is what you are looking for. g_ is like $, but without the newline character at the end.

Use 0vg_ or ^vg_, depending if you want to copy from the beginning of the line, or the first character on the line, respectively.

0v$
^v$
0vg_
^vg_
$v0
$v^
g_v0
g_v^

all do the job with different conceptions of what a line is (from first column or from first printable character, to last character or to last printable character). You can create a custom mapping if you like.

Note that selecting text is often unnecessary in vim.