Viewing man pages in vim

Try this: capture the man output, and if successful launch vim

viman () { text=$(man "$@") && echo "$text" | vim -R +":set ft=man" - ; }

I like the idea of checking the man return code; you can't pipe to the test, though. You could just run man twice:

viman () { man "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1 && man "$@" | vim -R +":set ft=man" - ; }

This runs man ... | vim ... only if the first invocation of man was successful.

There's an environment variable called MANPAGER which can be used to make man call the command you want for displaying the manpage. The advantage of this is that you call man directly, and it won't run the pager at all if the manpage didn't exist.

So a wrapper script, say in ~/bin/vimman:

#! /bin/sh
vim -R +":set ft=man" -

With this in your shell initialisation files somewhere:

export MANPAGER="$HOME/bin/vimman"

And you can directly run man foo to manpages in Vim.

(Depending on the man command being used, you could also have:

export MANPAGER='vim -R +":set ft=man" -'

directly instead of a wrapper script.)

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If you have a new enough Vim, you can use the --not-a-term option to stop Vim from complaining about stdin not being a TTY.

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Shameless plug: I wrote a small plugin to facilitate using Vim as manpager.