HelpMe!

Have you ever found yourself staring at a blinking cursor on Vim's command line, trying your hardest to remember what the command you're trying to perform is?

Are you learning a new SuperCoolLanguage library but you could not really remember that specific command and you are too tired to go through all the API documentation to find it out?

Well, I have both of these problems and this plugin may help you too.

HelpMe! is nothing more than a tiny customizable popup menu for Vim 9.0+ that you can fill as you want and that you can recall whenever you want.

Usage

Simply enter the command :HelpMe to open the menu, find what you're looking for, then press q to close the menu.

That's it.

Of course, there won't be much in the menu until you add stuff to it. Use the following .vimrc entry as an guide for customizing your own menu:

g:HelpMeItems = [
    "Shortcuts:",
    "tt           toggle split terminal buffer",
    "daw          delete a word under the cursor",
    "caw          change a word under the cursor and insert",
    "di\"         delete text inside quotes (for others, change \")",
    "ci\"         change text inside quotes (for others, change \")",
    "<C-n>        enter multiple cursors mode",
    "",
    "Commands:",
    ":H           insert nicely formatted header comment (custom)",
    ]

Then, invocation of :HelpMe will produce:

Mapping

You can map a shortcut to call :HelpMe with something like this:

noremap <silent> <C-h> <Cmd>HelpMe<CR>

This would make ctrl+h to open the HelpMe! menu. You still need to press q to close the menu.

Sourcing from external files

Sometimes, you want to take a look at different notes but you still want to access them at the speed of light without leaving Vim.

In such a case you can simply write your notes in an external file and source it through:HelpMe <filename>. For example, if you have a numpy_cmds.txt file in your HOME directory with the following content:

USEFUL NUMPY CONSTANTS
np.inf - Infinity
np.NINF - Negative infinity
np.NaN - Not a number
np.PI - 3.1415926535897932384626433...
np.e - 2.718281828459045235360287471...

USEFUL NDARRAY METHODS
A = np.array([[3, 1, 4], [5, -1, 9]]) - Array creation
iter = A.flat - iter is a np.ndarray iterator (it scans by rows)
A = np.atleast_1d(1.0) - A is a 1D np.ndarray

LINEAR ALGERBA
A @ B - Matrix multiplication
lambda, U = la.eig(A) - eigenvalues and (right) eigenvectors

then :HelpMe ~/numpy_cmds.txt will produce:

or, if you have a shopping_list.txt with the following content:

SHOPPING LIST
-------------
Potatoes
Milk
Bananas
Peperoni
Tomatoes

then :HelpMe ~/shopping_list.txt will produce:

You can also create custom commands to source from different files, like for example:

command! HelpMeNumpy :HelpMe ~/numpy_cmds.txt
command! HelpMeShopping :HelpMe ~/shopping_list.txt

Invokation of :HelpMeNumpy and :HelpMeShopping will produce the output depicted in the previous two screenshots, respectively.

Installation

Suggested installation method is through Vim-Plug: add Plug 'ubaldot/helpme-vim' to your .vimrc file run :PlugInstall.

License

BSD-3 Clause.