What is a way to read man pages in Vim without using temporary files

Question

I want to be able to read man pages in Vim.

For some reason, it seems that Vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping. E.g (man ls) | vi doesn't seem to work, bonus points for somebody who can explain why.

To get around this, I've been using the following little script:

tempo = `mktemp`
man $1 > $tempo ; vi $tempo

This script uses temporary files which I guess work fine, but I was wondering if there was a good way to read man pages in Vim without resorting to creating temporary files

score 48 · Answer 1 · answered May 25 '13 at 14:46

48

Vim includes a man page viewer, :Man, in its runtime files.

Put this line in your vimrc:

runtime! ftplugin/man.vim

Now you can read syntax-highlighted man pages inside Vim by running :Man. For example:

:Man 3 printf

Even better, you can just place your cursor on a word in the buffer and press <Leader>K (\K) to see the man page for that word.

See :h find-manpage for complete usage and installation instructions.

answered May 25 '13 at 14:46

glts

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[Vim SuperMan](https://github.com/Z1MM32M4N) is a convenient vim plugin that wraps this plugin's functionality so that you can also open man pages from the command line (without opening Vim first) – jez Dec 22 '14 at 14:09
1

That one went private, looks like there's one at jez/vim-superman – John P Jan 24 '17 at 17:18

score 45 · Accepted Answer · answered May 24 '13 at 17:12

45

For some reason, it seems that vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping […]

According to the man-page, you need to specify a file of - to get it to read from standard input; so:

man ls | vi -

If that doesn't work, you might try using process substitution:

vi <(man $1)

which creates a sort of pseudo-file and passes it to vi.

answered May 24 '13 at 17:12

ruakh

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Thank you, good answer and a good explanation. I'll make sure to read man pages a bit more carefully in the future :) – MYV May 24 '13 at 17:17
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@Maksim: You're welcome! Incidentally, many other utilities also use of `-` to mean "standard input". I guess you haven't needed to use that so much, because usually they'll also use standard input as a default if you don't specify *any* filename. `vi` is an exception in that respect, which can be confusing. :-) – ruakh May 24 '13 at 17:56

Rory Hunter · Answer 3 · 2013-05-28T17:47:05.127

17

On my system (Mac OS X), I found that the above left control characters in the output. Instead I used:

export MANPAGER="col -b | vim -MR - "

then just e.g.

man vim

The vim options turn off modifying the buffer and make it read-only. This stops vim complaining if you try to exit with ":q" (you can use :q! of course, but you might as well set the options).

This is also handy for general use - I have the following. The -c command names the buffer, just for completeness.

alias vimpager="vim -MR -c 'file [stdin]' -"

edited May 28 '13 at 17:47

answered May 24 '13 at 18:39

Rory Hunter

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I think this should be the answer as it answers the question of how to read man pages in vim. Bonus points for not requiring you to change anything in your normal man invocation. – Jacob Degeling Sep 14 '16 at 03:04
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Adapted from [here](https://muru.dev/2015/08/28/vim-for-man.html), making the command work for Neovim on Linux and setting the window title (`titlestring`) to the name of the man page, for example `bash(1)`: `export MANPAGER='nvim -c "%! col -b" -c "set ft=man nomod | let &titlestring=$MAN_PN"'` – Matthias Braun Oct 02 '21 at 11:36
Since a few days ago on Arch Linux, the command using `col -b` leaves artifacts like "1m" or "4m22m" in the output. `MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'` works. I learned about that plugin [here](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/487415/viewing-man-pages-in-vim#612930). See the plugin's [documentation](https://neovim.io/doc/user/filetype.html#ft-man-plugin) regarding usage (it supports navigation). – Matthias Braun Jul 12 '23 at 12:14

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 07 '21 at 19:54

7

Here is what I did: I've made a function in my .bashrc:

vman() { vim <(man $1); }

When I call vman this automatically calls Vim showing the man page. It works great.

edited Sep 07 '21 at 19:54

Matthias Braun

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answered Jul 31 '14 at 11:40

nacholibre

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To set the title of Vim's window to the name of the program whose man page you're looking at (instead of the path of the file descriptor), use this: `vim -c ":set titlestring=$1" <(man "$1")` – Matthias Braun Sep 07 '21 at 19:56
I also suggest adding a syntax parameter: `vim -c ":set titlestring=$1" -c ":set syntax=man" <(man "$1")` – yaeuge Dec 20 '22 at 18:46

score 4 · Answer 5 · edited May 24 '13 at 17:15

4

Your example code is wrong.

   tempo=`mktemp`
   man $1 > $tempo; vi $tempo

But you really only need

   man $1 | vi -

edited May 24 '13 at 17:15

Karoly Horvath

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answered May 24 '13 at 17:12

Otto Allmendinger

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score 4 · Answer 6 · answered May 25 '13 at 14:58

By default vim reads vimscripts (=vim commands), not input files, from stdin. That is why you cannot directly pipe man output to vim; as others have mentioned you have to use vim - to make vim read from stdin.

However piping vimscripts can be useful too:

vim test.txt <<EOF
:%s/[aiueo]/X/g
:wq! output.txt
EOF

The above will use vim to open test.txt, replace all vowels with X, write the results to output.txt, and quit (ignoring changes to the original file). It uses a here document but you can of course put the vim commands in a file and use vim test.txt < myscript or cat myscript | vim test.txt to achieve the same result.

I suspect the reason they did it this way was that you can open multiple input files but only execute one script. If input was read from stdin by default, you could only read one buffer that way.

score 4 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 07 '16 at 15:41

4

You also can press shift-k on your c function to print the man page

answered Dec 07 '16 at 15:41

albttx

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Green Bird · Answer 8 · 2016-11-29T03:48:29.937

2

I combined others answers, I am using

vman() {
    export MANPAGER="col -b" # for FreeBSD/MacOS

    # Make it read-only
    eval 'man $@ | vim -MR +"set filetype=man" -'

    unset MANPAGER
}

Usage:

vman ls

edited Nov 29 '16 at 03:48

answered Nov 28 '16 at 16:30

Green Bird

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score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 05 '14 at 07:47

I have a better solution, the one that I used, it is like this:

/bin/sh -c "unset PAGER;col -b -x | vim -R -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -c 'map q :q<CR>' -c 'map <SPACE> <C-D>' -c 'map b <C-U>' -c 'nmap K :Man <C-R>=expand(\"<cword>\")<CR><CR>' -"

Hope you'll enjoy it.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Nov 10 '19 at 23:45

0

You can always use info command for info pages and do info {cmd} | vim.

Source.

answered Nov 10 '19 at 23:45

andrewgazelka

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score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Aug 04 '20 at 08:14

A lot of good answers, with respect to plugins it's worth to add that vim-man^* provides a set of convenience functions to open and read man pages:

Viewing man pages, as per docs.

:Man printf - open printf(1) man page in a split
:Vman 3 putc - open putc(3) man page in a vertical split
:Man pri<Tab> - command completion for man page names

^{* Available on GitHub: https://github.com/vim-utils/vim-man.}

What is a way to read man pages in Vim without using temporary files

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