What is a way to read man pages in vim without using temporary files

Vim includes a man page viewer, :Man, in its runtime files.

Put this line in your vimrc:

runtime! ftplugin/man.vim

Now you can read syntax-highlighted man pages inside Vim by running :Man. For example:

:Man 3 printf

Even better, you can just place your cursor on a word in the buffer and press <Leader>K (\K) to see the man page for that word.

See :h find-manpage for complete usage and installation instructions.

For some reason, it seems that vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping […]

According to the man-page, you need to specify a file of - to get it to read from standard input; so:

man ls | vi -

If that doesn't work, you might try using process substitution:

vi <(man $1)

which creates a sort of pseudo-file and passes it to vi.

Here is what I did: I've made a function in my .bashrc:

vman() { vim <(man $1); }

When I call vman this automatically calls Vim showing the man page. It works great.

On my system (Mac OS X), I found that the above left control characters in the output. Instead I used:

export MANPAGER="col -b | vim -MR - "

then just e.g.

man vim

The vim options turn off modifying the buffer and make it read-only. This stops vim complaining if you try to exit with ":q" (you can use :q! of course, but you might as well set the options).

This is also handy for general use - I have the following. The -c command names the buffer, just for completeness.

alias vimpager="vim -MR -c 'file [stdin]' -"