Is it possible to view the help in Vim at a text width greater than 77 characters? Can Vim reflow the help text?
2 Answers
A "help page" is nothing more than a buffer with filetype=help
and nomodifiable
set.
You can make it modifiable with :set modifiable
, and then edit it like you would any buffer, e.g. by setting the textwidth
to what you like and using gq
to re-format text.
If you would like to do this automatically, you can do something like:
augroup help
autocmd!
autocmd Filetype help
\ set modifiable noreadonly textwidth=120
\| normal! gqG
augroup end
However, a quick test reveals that this doesn't work very well for many help pages, so I wouldn't recommend doing this. You'll have to make a custom formatprg
or equalprg
.
-
That most likely won't work very well, because the Vim help files are written for terminal size windows. It might be easier to view the html vim documentation files with a text browser, which should be able to reflow for wider screens. Dec 21, 2016 at 20:53
I don't think it's possible. Vim just displays a text file in a help window with proper highlighting. All help files are available at $VIMRUNTIME/doc/
and they are already formatted with that width.