Use Vim to read manual page

Posted November 9th, 2007 by Huahai
in

Command line manual page is an indispensable tool for working with Linux system.If you forget how to use a command, just type man followed by the name of the command. One thing I don't like about the manual system on my Debian sid is that it uses most to display the manual. The key bindings of most feel awkward for me since I am used to vim. Of course, there are many "vimers" like me, and they've found ways to fix this. Actually, there are many different ways, but I find the approach below works best for me. Basically, it involves creating a shell alias for man, so when man is used, shell invokes vim instead to read the manual. The following is added in ~/.bashrc:

# use vim as man's pager, rely on ManPageView plugin
vman() {
  /usr/bin/whatis "$@" > /dev/null
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    /usr/bin/vim -c "Man $@" -c 'silent! only' -c 'nmap q :q<cr>'
  else
    /usr/bin/man "$@"
  fi
}
alias man='vman'

This script relies on ManPageView plugin. However, I found the bundled syntax highlighting for this plug-in does not work as I expected, so I just deleted ~/.vim/syntax/man.vim. It works because vim 7.0 has manual page syntax highlighting already built-in.

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