Vim - Getting Help

Vim is feature rich editor hence remembering everything about it will be difficult. But there is no need to worry, we can always ask for help. Fortunately this help is provided by Vim itself.

In this chapter, we will discuss following items −

• Access help manual
• Help on specific topic
• Search help phrase in manual
• Access online help

Access help manual

Help manual is shipped with Vim editor itself and it is really comprehensive. To access help execute below command −

:help

Help on specific topic

Help manual will show entire help about Vim. But what if, we are only interested in certain topic. Vim provides command for that as well with following syntax

:help <topic-name>

In above command replace <topic-name> with topic in which you are interested. Forinstance to access help about vim mode, execute following command

:help modes

Search help phrase in manual

You can search specific topic only if you know its name. But what if, you don’t know the exact name of help topic. In that case you can use below command −

:helpgrep <phrase>

For instance, to access help about navigation in Vim execute below command

:helpgrep navigation

Access online help

Vim also provides online help. To access online help −

• Visit vim-help URL

• Additionally you can also refer vim-docs documentation