.vimrc
lately, and this is one of the more useful things I've added. I have forgotten where it came from exactly, but here it is:let $GROFF_NO_SGR=1 source $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/man.vim nmap K :Man <cword><CR>
What's it good for? The default key binding for K (that's "shift-k" I guess) in
vim
is to look up the word under the cursor using the man
command. The sad thing about this process is that vim
gets replaced by less
(or whatever pager you happen to be using), and that once you're done reading the page, you have to press "Enter" one additional time to get back into vim
and back to whatever you were doing. Kinda breaks your flow, you know?Once you've added the three lines above to your
.vimrc
things are quite different. When you hit K, the man page opens as a new split window inside of vim
so you're staying in the same environment. All the usual binds for switching between windows work, so you can keep the man
page open while going back to your code. Better yet, the man
page will be "syntax highlighted" using different colors for headings, text, and (you guessed it) references to other man
pages. And the best thing? You can browse man
pages the same way you browse tags
: use "ctrl-]" to open another man
page and use "ctrl-t" to "go back" to the previous one.Now that's how
man
pages were supposed to be integrated with your editor. Very nice indeed... :-DThere's one small problem that I have not been able to work around yet: The original K could be preceded by the section number to look in, but this won't work in the replacement above. I am not enough of a
vim
hacker yet to add that capability. Shame on me?Update: Actually, I forced myself to learn just enough of
vimscript
to cobble together something ugly for section numbers:" experimental hack to get section numbers to work as well function ManWrapper(n, w) if a:n > 0 let cnt = a:n-line(".")+1 execute "Man" cnt a:w else execute "Man" a:w endif endfunction com -count=0 -nargs=+ CMan :call ManWrapper(<count>, <f-args>) nmap X :CMan <cword><cr>
Yes, I know, it's quite horrific! If you know this dreadful language better, please tell me how to rewrite this cleanly.
Note you can use vim as your man pager at the standard shell too, with the highlighting and drill down benefits you mention.
ReplyDeleteSee the section towards the top of my:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/settings/.bashrc
Thanks so much for this! I was inspired by your post, but agree that function is gross. So I played a little vim golf. Don't seem to need GROFF_NO_SGR on my newish Arch build, so just two lines sufficed.
ReplyDeleteruntime ftplugin/man.vim
nnoremap <silent>K :<C-U>exe "Man" v:count "<cword>"<CR>
This also handles the numeric prefix for specifying a section.The Man command seems to happily eat whatever numbers you throw at it and will return a best guess if the section isn't found.
Glad you found my hack useful as a starting point. And thank you in turn for finding a nicer version of doing things! :-)
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