Open Vim help file directly from terminal

Question

We can get help on Vim functions by typing the following from within Vim.

:help somecommand

For example, the following sends us to the help text for the unmap functionality.:

:help unmap

Is there any way to get Vim help directly in the terminal? If I could put that functionality into a function, called say, vimhelp, I could then run from the terminal:

vimhelp unmap

And I could then open that text in Vim, like a normal file. Then I can use all the functionality I have come up with for all file working.

The question is now answered but for documentation purposes I would like to provide here the current state of the solution.

emanvim(){
    if [ -z "${1}" ]; then
        printf "Please provide Vim help topic.\n";
        return;
        fi  

    vim -i NONE -c "set bt=help|help $1" -- /tmp/dummy;
    };

Answer 1

This is more likely a Shell-scripting question. You could define the following function in your .bashrc:

vimhelp() {
    if [ -n "$1" ]; then
      vim -i NONE -c "set bt=help|help $1" -c 'nnoremap q :q!<cr>'
    else
      echo "please give help-topic to jump to"
    fi
  }

after resourcing your .bashrc file, you can use the command vimhelp unmap to directly jump to that in your vim editor.

Answer 2

My very similar function is

vh() {
  vim +"help $*" +only
}

Based on some comments, I'll also mention that I have nnoremap <buffer> q :quit in ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/help.vim.