til/unix/make-neovim-the-default-way-to-view-man-pages.md

Make Neovim The Default Way To View Man Pages

I was reading the help page for :Man which is the built-in plugin to Neovim for viewing man pages within a Neovim session. In it, they mentioned that the MANPAGER can be set to use Neovim instead of the default man page viewer.

This can be done by setting MANPAGER like so:

$ export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'

After setting this, you can run something like man git-restore which will open the man page for that command in a Neovim session using the Man page plugin which can do things like follow links to other man pages (K or Ctrl=]), quit by hitting q, as well as all the motions and search behavior of Vim.

For long-term use, this can be set in your shell config, e.g. ~/.zshrc. For one-off use, you can include it as an env var for a single call to man:

MANPAGER='nvim +Man!' man git-restore

See :h :Man within a Neovim session for more details.