I’ve been using vim and neovim for several years, and over the time I’ve accumulated several useful plugins. I do try to keep the amount of plugins to a minimum, as there are several reasons not to use plugins (security, setup, mental and computing overhead). Still, there are several really good plugins there, and they are part of what makes Vim and Neovim great.

So there are several times where I need to consult my configuration files as to remember how certain plugins are used. Every now and then I might also forget how I’ve structured certain setup. So I figured that why not simply create my own help files, available from within vim.

The documentation of help files can be found in :help help,

So to accomplish this I created a doc folder within my vim configuration directory, and created a file my-usage.txt within it. The syntax for the help files can pretty easily be understood by simply reading the files. There is documentation within :help help-writing on how to write help files, and here is a simple example

*filename.txt* What does this file describe

Some more text

==============================================================================
Some section title			                               			*my-section*

Even more text, |link|, `command`

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some sub-section			                                 			*my-commands*

more text

Syntax is best described in :help notation.

Once you’ve created your personal documentation file you need to run :helptags ALL as to generate tag files used by vim to find the sections. So once you’ve created tag files on the text above you can find my-.. using autocomplete with :help my-. Pretty handy!