Vim + Pathogen not loading help docs

Question

Currently I use Pathogen to organize my vim plugins. It seems to do this fine and without a hitch but for some reason the helptags are not generated. I don't think my file structure is at fault (although it could be) because as far as I can tell I've set it up correctly, e.g: pathogen.vim is in ~/.vim/autoload and all my plugins are in ~/.vim/bundle

My .vimrc is aliased to the HOME directory so I can quickly find it and open it and the pathogen related part looks like this:

filetype off
call pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles() 
call pathogen#helptags()

I feel like I've tried every iteration of this I've found on the internet as well and nothing has been successful. The plugins seem to work just fine every time but I can never get the help docs using the helptags. I'm using Mac OSX 10.6 if that helps.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

I had the same problem of not finding the help when updating pathogen - I just had to run the following command to generate the helptags:

:Helptags

If you simply add the line to start pathogen to:

call pathogen#infect()
Helptags

It will generate them on startup and you will have the help as always.

Answer 2

To quote tpope from the vim-pathogen README:

Normally to generate documentation, Vim expects you to run :helptags on each directory with documentation (e.g., :helptags ~/.vim/doc). Provided with pathogen.vim is a :Helptags command that does this on every directory in your 'runtimepath'. If you really want to get crazy, you could even invoke Helptags in your vimrc. I don't like to get crazy.

Answer 3

On 4/13/2011 a :Helptags command was added, which generates help tags along the 'runtimepath'

The preferred way of initializing the plugin is now:

call pathogen#infect()
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on

All this and more in the docs