How to find out the default editor for man pages on osx?

Question

I want to make the default editor for man pages to be vi. Right now it is something else.

I know it is something else, because when I try to do a case insensitive search, it doesn't work the way it does in vim:

/someWord\c

the above does not work in man pages, but it does work in vim.

How do I find out the editor for man pages? thank

"editing" ≠ "viewing". "based on" ≠ "the same as". "vi" ≠ "vim". — romainl, Sep 20 '16 at 07:19

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 20 '16 at 05:57

3

The default pager for man is less. When -i is passed to less searches with no capital letters are case-insensitive.

answered Sep 20 '16 at 05:57

the `less` man page says "*Commands are based on both more and vi*", which made me think that the same things in vi should work here. – makansij Sep 20 '16 at 06:11
[Pager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager). "based on", not "same as". – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Sep 20 '16 at 06:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 20 '16 at 09:39

The default pager for man is less. To use vim as the pager, just place the following code in your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zshrc.

export MANPAGER="/bin/sh -c \"col -b | vim -c 'set ft=man ts=8 nomod nolist nonu noma' -\""

The above command uses the col utility to remove extra ^H (backspace) characters. Next it pipe's the output to vim with the options below.

ft=man enables the coloring of the man page.
ts=8 ensures the width of tab characters matches less.
nomod removes the modification warning when trying to quit.
nonu removes line numbers.
nolist disables listchars so trailing whitespace and extra tabs are not highlighted.
noma prevents the buffer contents from being changed.

2 Answers2