Question

I’m using Vim to read man and I’m trying to set up a script in my vimrc that will display NERDTree unless I’m reading from a man page.

I’ve got the following in vimrc:

" This is needed because $MANPATH wasn't set in my environment    
let $MANPATH=substitute(system("manpath"),"\n","","") 

if (match(expand("%:p:h"),$MANPATH) == -1)
    echo ("manpath is: ".$MANPATH)
    echo ("path is: ".expand("%:p:h"))
    echo ("match: ".match(expand("%:p:h"),$MANPATH))
    " Load NERDTree here
endif

When I run vim normally, it works as expected:

andrey@Andrey-P:~$ vim file.txt
manpath is: /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
path is: /home/andrey
match: -1

However, opening a man page returns this:

andrey@Andrey-P:~$ man vim
manpath is: /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
path is: /usr/share/man
match: -1

One would expect this to be a fairly straightforward match to make, but it doesn’t seem to work. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

It looks like you’ve got the arguments to match() the wrong way around. The first argument should be the expression to be searched ($MANPATH in your case) and the second argument should be search pattern.

See :help match() for a full description of the function.