Changes: Vim FAQ and other documentation

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Tip: #1172 - Vim FAQ and other documentation

Created: March 15, 2006 17:24 Complexity: basic Author: Gerald Lai Version: 5.7 Karma: 34/24 Imported from: Tip#1172

For those of you who do not realize this already, Vimdoc contains some of the most useful information on Vim found on the Internet:

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/

Especially useful is the FAQ at:

http://www.geocities.com/yegappan/vim_faq.txt

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/vimfaq.html

that answers a lot of basic (and advanced) questions about how to perform tasks in Vim. If you ever had any questions regarding Vim, make sure you do a search through the FAQ first before looking at any other resource.

To make the FAQ part of Vim help, copy the file at:

http://www.geocities.com/yegappan/vim_faq_help.txt

to the "doc" directory - for example, in Unix/Linux systems:

$ cp vim_faq_help.txt ~/.vim/doc

Then in Vim, do:

:helptags ~/.vim/doc

After that, to access the FAQ, do:

:help FAQ

Also, a must-read is Bram Moolenaar's "Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing" at:

http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

Comments

This command does all that in one strike (on linux).

$ (cd ~/.vim/doc; wget http://www.geocities.com/yegappan/vim_faq_help.txt; vim "+:helptags .|q")

mikael [at] alminde [dotorganisation] , March 16, 2006 10:06

If ":help FAQ" does not work after :helptags, try

:help vim_faq.txt

Gerald Lai , March 16, 2006 11:05

after execute :helptag $vimruntime/doc, I type help FAQ,the vim will jump to intro.txt,not the vim_faq.txt. and if type: help vim_faq.txt, the error message is : no help for vim_faq.txt

zzczx--AT--163.com , March 16, 2006 22:32

Make sure you have write-access to $VIMRUNTIME. Also, it must be in CAPITAL letters.

Gerald Lai , March 21, 2006 14:26

I downloaded and tried

:helptags .

which gave the following errors:

E154: Duplicate tag "FAQ" in file ./vim_faq_help.txt 
E154: Duplicate tag "faq" in file ./vim_faq_help.txt

So I edited vim_faq_help.txt, and on line 11 changed

*faq* *FAQ*

to

*iaq* *IAQ*

and re-did

:helptags .

("IAQ": "Infrequently asked questions)

And now

:help iaq

works fine instead. The duplicate tag is on line 78 of intro.txt (*intro.txt* For Vim version 6.4. Last change: 2004 Jun 12)

vim--AT--al-got-rhythm.net , March 27, 2006 2:53