Is there a simpler way to link to the help?

Question

Many answers (and some questions) include information from vim's builtin documentation. I often find myself on google looking for an HTML version of the vim help, so I can link to it in my answers.

With this in mind, I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to automatically link :help [key] in answers to online documentation, so the audience doesn't have to switch from their browser to vim to check it out?
2. Is there a preferred site hosting the vim documentation?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Update 20150825: an improved of this now lives at http://code.arp242.net/helplink.vim. It has a number of improvements, and you can install it as a plugin :-)

I will leave the original since it's a lot simpler and might be more helpful to show how this can be done.

---

I've been using this function; it will (backwards) look for the first tag, and return that in Markdown link. It also puts in the clipboard...

So you can just use :help from Vim, and when you want to link something use :echo Helplink().

" Make help link (markdown format)
" TODO: Find all tags, and let the user choose which one to use
fun! Helplink()
    " Get the name of the tag, With help from:
    " https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/434/get-name-of-nearest-tag-to-the-cursor
    if !search('\*\zs[^*]\+\*$', 'bW')
        echoerr "No tag found"
    endif
    let l:line = getline('.')
    let l:start = col('.') - 1
    call search('\*', '', line('.'))
    let l:len =  col('.') - l:start - 1
    let l:tagname = strpart(l:line, l:start, l:len)

    " TODO: Also support Python 2 and maybe Ruby...
    let l:tagname_esc = system('python3 -c "import sys, urllib.parse as p;  empty=' . "''" . '; print(p.quote(sys.argv[1], safe=empty), end=empty)" ' . shellescape(b:tagname))
    let l:file = split(expand('%'), '/')[-1]
    let l:url = "http://vimhelp.appspot.com/" . l:file . ".html#" . l:tagname_esc
    let l:md = '[`:help ' . l:tagname . '`](' . l:url . ')'

    " Copy it to the clipboard
    let @+ = l:md

    return l:md
endfun

Answer 2

Is there any way to automatically link :help [key] in answers to online documentation, so the audience doesn't have to switch from their browser to vim to check it out?

Without commenting on whether or not I think such a feature would be useful, that kind of specialized feature generally wouldn't be written for a site until after it's out of beta. You may want to bring it up again if we get to that point.

Is there a preferred site hosting the vim documentation?

Whichever you want to use is entirely up to you.

http://vimhelp.appspot.com/ seems okay.
There's also http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/ but this seems outdated (Vim 7.3)