Execute Vim commands from shell

Question

How to execute Vim commands from shell? For ex I want to see man pages of grep command in vim typing command from shell(bash,zsh) command something like:

vim ':Man grep'

Is it possible?

Answer 1

From vim manpage:

  -c {command}
               {command} will be executed after the first file has been read.  {command} is  interpreted  as  an  Ex
               command.   If the {command} contains spaces it must be enclosed in double quotes (this depends on the
               shell that is used).  Example: Vim "+set si" main.c
               Note: You can use up to 10 "+" or "-c" commands.

From vim help:

To start using the ":Man" command before any manual page was loaded, source     
this script from your startup vimrc file:                                       

    runtime ftplugin/man.vim

Assuming you don't have man.vim sourced in vimrc, the following should work:

vim -c 'runtime ftplugin/man.vim' -c 'Man grep'

If you do have man.vim already sourcerd in vimrc, you can skip the explicit sourcing command argument to vim

And you'll probably want a shell script wrapper that will accept an argument so you'll be able to do something like

$ m ls

with content of m script being

#!/bin/sh

vim -c 'runtime ftplugin/man.vim' -c "Man $1"

Notice the usage of double quotes so $1 gets understood properly by bash as the passed argument.

Of course you can always hit K on current word in vim to open the manpage for that word, but since you're explicitly telling that you want to do it from shell, I assume you know about this.