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.
. There is no warranty of any kind, expressed or implied.