nvi comes with quite comprehensive printable documentation. In particular, it comes with troff source, formatted ASCII, and formatted PostScript for the following documents:
The reference manual for nvi. This manual describes all of the nvi command line options, commands, options, and ex commands.
The man page for nvi.
This document is a tutorial introduction to editing with vi.
The reference manual for ex. This manual is the original one for ex; it is a bit out-of-date with respect to the facilities in nvi.
Also included are ASCII files that document some of the nvi internals, and provide a list of features that should be implemented, and files that can be used as an online tutorial to vi.
The actual online help built in to nvi is
minimal, consisting of two commands,
:exusage
and
:viusage
.
These commands provide one-line summaries of each ex
and vi command.
This is usually sufficient to remind you about how something works,
but not very good for learning about new or obscure features
in nvi.
You can give a command as an argument to the :exusage
and
:viusage
commands, in which case nvi
will display the help just for that command.
nvi prints one line explaining what the command does,
and a one-line summary of the command's usage.