Vim74: E149 Sorry no help for help.txt

Question

I just downloaded and installed vim74 on to my linux box. I'm only installing locally, for the user. When I go into vim, and do :help, I get the error.

I tried adding:

let $VIM='home/myuser/vim74'
let $VIMRUNTIME='home/myuser/vim74/runtime'

to my .vimrc but it didn't help. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

When building vim yourself and installing locally it seems that you need to generate the helptags manually from within vim since the build process doesn't seem to do it. I ran into this very same issue when building the latest vim version 8.0.311. I followed the link in Ben Klein's comment above, but both my &helpfile and &runtimepath were correct, yet I still received the E149 error when doing :help which I assume is your situation as well postelrich.

I found the helptags solution here:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/1087

Even though I was installing vim locally on a centos system and not a mac, the issue seems to be universal. I just replaced $VIMRUNTIME with the path to the local vim runtime installed from make install, which in your case may be something like /home/myuser/vim74/runtime

Specifically I ran this from within vim:

:helptags ~/share/vim/vim80/doc

In your case you will probably run something like:

:helptags ~/vim74/runtime/doc

Once done, :help should immediately start working again without having to restart vim.