vim.help is a mirror of Vim built-in help, adapted and improved for the web.
The goal is to ultimately format all the help files, but for now only the user manual is considered, as many pages of the reference manual need special processing to be made legible. If you want to help, check out Contributing.
While there's plenty of excellent articles, tutorials and books on Vim out there (and even more sub-par ones), the built-in documentation is still one of the best sources to learn about Vim. Sadly, it's often overlooked by both beginners and regular users alike.
There already exists a mirror of the doc online, but it doesn't do much to improve the reading experience. The goal of this project is to make Vim's docs easier to reach from any device, more pleasant to peruse and more attractive for newcomers and inexperienced users.
Vim's help is split into two sections: a user manual and a reference manual.
The user manual is a thorough guide meant to accompany your journey from novice to Vim master. The first part is an introduction to the basic features and should be read in order. The second and third parts are respectively about editing text efficiently and fine-tuning Vim — their chapters can be read in any order. Finally, there's also a chapter on installing Vim and getting it to run properly.
The reference manual contains detailed descriptions of all available options, commands, mappings, etc., and isn't meant to be read from start to finish.
Contributions are welcomed! While the parser for the user manual is functional, there are still plenty of edge cases to catch. Furthermore, many pages of the reference manual have a unique format and need a special processor to turn them into legible web pages.
Other features that would be nice to have:
- full-site search (DocSearch seems pretty nice)
- better mobile and small-screen support
- better a11y (maybe a specific colorscheme?)
If you're interested in helping out, please take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md.
I want to keep this resource free and ad-free for the benefit of all the Vim lovers out there, and continuously improve it — but that takes a lot of time and resources. To help in that endeavor, you can support me on my Patreon or on PayPal.
Support doesn't have to be monetary though! Reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, contributing some code or even just spreading the word about the project helps a lot.
The Vim user manual and reference manual is by Bram Moolenaar. Parts of the user manual come from the book "Vi IMproved – Vim" by Steve Oualline.
The icons for the visual settings come from Font Awesome.
Colorschemes:
- Solarized Light by Ethan Schoonover
- Ayu Dark by Ike Ku
- "Rust" & "Coal" taken from the mdBook project
The Vim user manual and reference manual are Copyright © 1988-2003 by Bram Moolenaar. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later. The latest version is presently available at: http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.
Parts of the user manual come from the book "Vi IMproved – Vim" by Steve Oualline (published by New Riders Publishing, ISBN: 0735710015). The Open Publication License applies to this book. Only selected parts are included and these have been modified (e.g., by removing the pictures, updating the text for Vim 6.0 and later, fixing mistakes). The omission of the "frombook" tag does not mean that the text does not come from the book.
This software is distributed under the ISC license.