Find Help in Vim

Michael Chan
InstructorMichael Chan
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Published 5 years ago
Updated 4 years ago

Help is always at your fingertips in Vim. Vim's documentation is built right into the editor. Use the :help as a first line of defense before Stack Overflow or Google and you'll be able to spend more time in the editor.

Anything you can do in Vim has a really great :help doc...

Michael Chan: [00:00] To find help in Vim, type the command help, and hit Enter. By default, it will be taking to a help document that tells you how to move around, close this window, and get out of Vim. Going down further we'll find ways to get help on a specific topic.

[00:18] If we take the first example, we can get help on what x does in normal mode. We can even get help on the help command itself, with :help help. In this doc, we see that the help command can be abbreviated to :h. We can find the help that we need to quit vim, write or save files, read or open files, and literally anything else.

[00:44] We can even find the help that we need to close this help window with help close.

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