Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Built-in Help

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Vim comes with more than 100,000 lines of documentation. Almost all of this is immediately available to you from Vim’s built-in help facility. In its simplest form, you invoke the :help command. (This is interesting because it exposes users to their first example of Vim’s multiple window editing.)

While this is nice, it presents a bit of a chicken-and-egg conundrum because the built-in help requires a modicum of understanding of vi navigation techniques; for it to be really effective, users must know how to jump back and forth in tags. We’ll give an overview of help screen navigation here.

The :help command brings up something similar to:

*help.txt*      For Vim version 7.0.  Last change: 2006 May 07

                        VIM - main help file
                                                                         k
      Move around:  Use the cursor keys, or "h" to go left,            h   l
                    "j" to go down, "k" to go up, "l" to go right.       j
Close this window:  Use ":q[Enter]".
   Get out of Vim:  Use ":qa![Enter]" (careful, all changes are lost!).

Jump to a subject:  Position the cursor on a tag (e.g. |bars|) and hit CTRL-].
   With the mouse:  ":set mouse=a" to enable the mouse (in xterm or GUI).
                    Double-click the left mouse button on a tag, e.g. |bars|.
        Jump back:  Type CTRL-T or CTRL-O (repeat to go further back).

Get specific help:  It is possible to go directly to whatever you want help
                    on, by giving an argument to the |:help| command.
                    It is possible to further specify the context:
                                                        *help-context*
                          WHAT                  PREPEND    EXAMPLE      ~
                      Normal mode command      (nothing)   :help x