The help page

In Vim and Neovim the official documentation actually lives inside the editor itself. We call this the "help page."

If you are interested in reading the documentation using your browser:

• Neovim's online documentation
• Vim's online documentation

The :help command

:help is the mechanism we use to navigate the documentation inside the editor.

If we provide an argument to the :help command it will show a specific part of the documentation. For example, we can learn about the syntax of the command with this:

:help help-summary

:help is good when we have an idea of the thing we looking for. When we already know the right words and terms. I say this because :help will search for "help tags." If the term we provide is not part of a help tag the command will fail.

If we only have a vague clue of the thing we are looking the :helpgrep command is a better option. This will search the content of the help pages instead of just help tags. Here's an example.

:helpgrep thesaurus

The results of the search will be stored in a quickfix list and the cursor will move to the first match.

We can inspect the quickfix list using this command.

:copen

Once inside the quickfix window press Enter in any item to move to that location.

The user manual

The user manual is a book, a practical guide on how to use Vim. Yes, Vim. But don't worry because 99% of it still applies to Neovim.

This book has 40+ chapters so I don't expect anyone to read all of it. So here are the chapters I think will be useful to someone that's just starting to learn about Vim.

Command	Description
:help usr_toc	Table of content
:help usr_02	The first steps in Vim
:help usr_03	Moving around
:help usr_04	Making small changes
:help usr_20	Typing command-line commands quickly
:help usr_22	Finding the file to edit
:help usr_24	Inserting quickly

The reference manual

This is the part of the documentation that explains every feature available in the editor.

Note the reference manual in the Neovim's online documentation is generated from the master branch of the github repository. Keep this in mind if you want to learn about avanced features of the lua API, it can be different across Neovim versions.

Command	Description
:help reference_toc	List of help files
:help starting	Starting Vim, Vim command arguments, initialisation
:help cursor-motions	Commands for moving around
:help windows	Commands for using windows and buffers
:help map.txt	Key mapping and user-defined commands
:help autocmd	Automatic commands
:help lua-guide	Nvim lua guide
:help option-list	Overview of all options
:help Ex-commands	List of all the ":" commands
:help vimscript-functions	Vimscript functions
:help lua	Lua API
:help vimscript	Vimscript reference