Making K Useful

The default behavior of the K command is to lookup the keyword under the cursor using man. This is handy at times, but it's not very useful when I spend 90% of my day writing PHP code. Vim's online help mentions that you can set keywordprg to an alternative program, so I did the following.

set keywordprg=/home/travis/pdoc

Where pdoc is the following shell script:

 #!/bin/sh
firefox http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.$1.php

Now I can move the cursor over a builtin function, hit K, and firefox will open to the appropriate documentation. To keep things strictly textual, you could use lynx (or links) in lieu of firefox.

For ruby code, I like to do the following:

set keywordprg=ri

For Perl:

set keywordprg=perldoc\ -tf