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README.md

Md2Vim

Writing technical documentation for Vim extensions is not very exciting; having to manually convert what you've just written in Markdown to the vimdoc help format is even less fun. As I grew tired of doing this over and over for my ArgWrap extension, I decided to formally solve this problem for myself and others, creating the Md2Vim converter tool.

Md2Vim is implemented in Golang as a custom renderer for the blackfriday Markdown processor. Maintainability, ease of use, and beautiful vimdoc output were primary considerations in its design.

Installation

If you already have the Go environment and toolchain set up, you can get the latest version by running:

$ go get github.com/FooSoft/md2vim

Otherwise, you can use the pre-built binaries for the platforms below:

Example

Let's generate the documentation for ArgWrap by executing the command shown below (split into multiple lines due to length considerations):

$ md2vim \
    -desc "Wrap and unwrap function arguments, lists, and dictionaries in Vim" \
    -cols=120 \
    README.md \
    doc/argwrap.txt

And here is the animation of it happening in a terminal window; notice the pretty help file layout Vim.

Requirements

Md2Vim makes the reasonable assumption that your document headings are arranged in a single-root hierarchy for the purposes of table of contents generation. As long as you have exactly one top level heading (usually the title of your extension), with sub-headings following it (directions for installation, configurations, etc.) everything will look and work great. If you don't want to follow this hierarchy in your help file, you can still use this tool as long as you disable table of contents generation.

Usage

Executing Md2Vim with the -help command line argument will trigger online help to be displayed. The list below provides a more detailed description of what the parameters do.

cols

The number of columns used for laying out vimdoc files to make them look as good as possible with your content. Notice that file contents will not be wrapped to this value; this is purely for such things as horizontal rule widths and help tag positioning. This defaults to 80, but that's a bit too narrow for some people.
desc

Vim help files are supposed to start with the following two fields on the first line:
```
filename.txt Description of this help file's contents
```
The first field is the filename of the generated vimdoc help file; the second is the description can you provide with this parameter.

norules

By default, we generate horizontal rules above level 1-2 headings, as shown below:

================================================================================
Level 1 Heading
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Level 2 Heading

If you don't like the way it looks you can turn it off.

notoc

If you don't want to generate a table of contents you can specify this argument. The table of contents lists all of the child headings underneath the primary heading; it is always inserted right before the second heading in your document.
pascal

By default, all help tags get converted to lower case and space delimited words are joined with underscores.
```
rigellians-how_to_cook_for_fourty_humans
```
If you prefer the PascalCase way of doing things, set this flag and your output will look like this:
```
Rigellians-HowToCookForFourtyHumans
```
tabs

If you don't like four space tabs for some reason you can change it to something else with this parameter.