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

Question

I want to be able to read man pages in vim. For some reason, it seems that vim isn\'t able to read the output of programs through piping (i.e \'(man ls) | vi\' doesn\'t seem

Answer 1

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]' -"