Vim’s ability to display man pages easily using the K mapping often comes in handy. It has been bothering me for a while that the same thing doesn’t work properly in gVim, which I use more. The reason is that Vim’s ability to display man pages depends on having a terminal emulator, which just isn’t true for gVim, hence the garbled display of man pages one sees if one tries viewing a man page in gVim.
Today, I found a way around this limitation. It turns out Vim comes with support for displaying man pages in a split window, and it does it perfectly – colors, links, and all the necessary stuff. The first line enables this feature, which includes by default the K do the same in gVim. And unlike the original mapping, it also accepts a count before it, so pressing 3K will search section 3 of the man pages for the keyword under the cursor.
" Properly display man pages
" ==========================
runtime ftplugin/man.vim
if has("gui_running")
nnoremap K :<C-U>exe "Man" v:count "<C-R><C-W>"<CR>
endif