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Currently I use Pathogen to organize my vim plugins. It seems to do this fine and without a hitch but for some reason the helptags are not generated. I don't think my file structure is at fault (although it could be) because as far as I can tell I've set it up correctly, e.g: pathogen.vim is in ~/.vim/autoload and all my plugins are in ~/.vim/bundle

My .vimrc is aliased to the HOME directory so I can quickly find it and open it and the pathogen related part looks like this:

filetype off
call pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles() 
call pathogen#helptags()

I feel like I've tried every iteration of this I've found on the internet as well and nothing has been successful. The plugins seem to work just fine every time but I can never get the help docs using the helptags. I'm using Mac OSX 10.6 if that helps.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

Eric Fortis
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Phil Aquilina
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  • try moving the `filetype off` below the `calls`. In other words put pathogen stuff at the top of the `.vimrc` – Eric Fortis Aug 07 '11 at 02:42
  • The only thing I have above my pathogen calls in my .vimrc is `set nocompatible`. You might try adding that too. – Alex Aug 07 '11 at 03:49
  • Thanks for your replies guys. So I've moved the pathogen calls up underneath nocompatible. And I also tried moving the filetype off below the calls. Didn't have success in either. It just seems odd to me that Nerd tree loads right up but its help files don't. – Phil Aquilina Aug 07 '11 at 22:05
  • If there's any other info I can provide to help find a solution, I'll be glad to provide it. – Phil Aquilina Aug 07 '11 at 22:10
  • Ok I've narrowed the problem down a little. It turns out some of my other plugins help files work. I have four plugins. vim-rails, vim-ruby, EnhancedCommentify, and NerdTree. The help tags work for vim-ruby (:h ft-ruby-omni and :h ft-ruby-syntax) and EnhancedCommentify (:h EnhancedCommentify) but the other two don't work. Really weird. – Phil Aquilina Aug 07 '11 at 22:19
  • Did you manage to fix this? i'm having the exact same problem. – Guillermo Siliceo Trueba Sep 25 '11 at 04:29
  • Nope. Haven't looked at it since my last post so the problem still persists. I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem though. If you find a solution, please post it. – Phil Aquilina Sep 27 '11 at 21:30
  • See "[Vim helptag generation](http://stackoverflow.com/q/4180590/128421)" for additional information. – the Tin Man Oct 10 '13 at 18:50
  • This may sound really stupid, but for Windows users make sure your `bundle` files are in `vimfiles` instead of `vim74` or whatever it is. All the plugins will work if they're in `vim74`, but not `:Helptags`. – DavisDude Jul 15 '15 at 02:21
  • Possible duplicate of [Vim helptag generation](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4180590/vim-helptag-generation) – maxschlepzig Aug 27 '18 at 18:54

4 Answers4

74

I had the same problem of not finding the help when updating pathogen - I just had to run the following command to generate the helptags:

:Helptags

If you simply add the line to start pathogen to:

call pathogen#infect()
Helptags

It will generate them on startup and you will have the help as always.

BergmannF
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14

To quote tpope from the vim-pathogen README:

Normally to generate documentation, Vim expects you to run :helptags on each directory with documentation (e.g., :helptags ~/.vim/doc). Provided with pathogen.vim is a :Helptags command that does this on every directory in your 'runtimepath'. If you really want to get crazy, you could even invoke Helptags in your vimrc. I don't like to get crazy.

samstav
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5

On 4/13/2011 a :Helptags command was added, which generates help tags along the 'runtimepath'

The preferred way of initializing the plugin is now:

call pathogen#infect()
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on

All this and more in the docs

jinfield
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  • Thanks for your reply jinfield. I've tried this code in the past and tried it again after I saw your post. But it wasn't successful. – Phil Aquilina Aug 07 '11 at 22:07
  • This doesn't work. It never calls `Helptags`. @Gjallar's answer works and should be the accepted answer. – Justin Force Aug 30 '12 at 21:19
0

Take a look at my reply to "Pathogen does not load plugins". I think it might address your problem. Once you follow what I mentioned there, you should get the documentation for your plugins as wanted.

Community
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fioghual
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