You may know that you can open man pages in a Neovim buffer with :Man.
However, you can also configure your shell to open manual pages in a
Neovim buffer when called from the command line.
First, if you’re unfamiliar, Neovim ships with the great :Man
command, which opens man pages in a nicely formatted buffer. These
buffers are normal Vim buffers, so come equipped with syntax
highlighting, can be easily searched, and links to other manual pages
can be followed with C-].
" Open the git manual page.
:Man git
You can also open man pages invoked inside Neovim’s terminal emulator using this same man buffer with a little configuration.
# This opens a man buffer?
man git
The man command can be configured to render pages with any program,
controlled by the $MANPAGER environment variable.
We could set $MANPAGER to nvim, but that would cause nesting Neovim
instances if called from inside a Neovim :terminal.
To work around this, we’ll need help from the neovim-remote
project (at least until Neovim core adds --remote
back). With that installed, we can call nvr inside
a Neovim terminal buffer to open the given file in the same Neovim
instance.
I personally would rather not launch a whole Neovim instance just
to render a man page if I’m not already inside Neovim, so for this
tip we’ll add some detection code to only set the $MANPAGER
value inside Neovim. We can do this by checking the value of the
$NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS environment variable, which will only be set
inside an instance of Neovim.
We’ll use the -o flag to open the man page in a new split, to help
retain the context of what you’re working on.
In your bash/zsh config file:
if [ -n "${NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS+x}" ]; then
export MANPAGER="/usr/local/bin/nvr -c 'Man!' -o -"
fi
Or for the fish shell:
if test -n "$NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS"
set -x MANPAGER "/usr/local/bin/nvr -c 'Man!' -o -"
end
And that’s it. Happy RTFM!