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Vim

Help Yourself

Help Yourself

The first place to turn when you need help is Vim itself. It has extensive documentation on every command and feature.

Type :help [command] to see help for any command.

For example, :help gg will explain what the gg command does.

Help opens in a new window split horizontally, see Windows section for working with windows.

Close the window split using ctrl-w c or :close

To make help the only window, use ctrl-w o or :only. This removes the split but does not close help or your original buffer. Close the help buffer using :bd, to switch back to your original buffer.

Help is simply a read-only buffer. You can navigate, highlight, copy, paste, search, and do any vim things as any other buffer, except edit. See Buffers section for more on working with buffers.

The help pages include tags to other help sections, depending on your colorscheme it might be blue. With your cursor on an item type ctrl-] to jump to that definition.

Jumping to tag definitions actually works for any words in help regardless if they are tags. If a definition exists for the word, you will jump to it. Tags tell you that a definition does actually exist.

Example using :help