What is a way to read man pages in Vim without using temporary files

I want to be able to read man pages in Vim.

For some reason, it seems that Vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping. E.g (man ls) | vi doesn't seem to work, bonus points for somebody who can explain why.

To get around this, I've been using the following little script:

tempo = `mktemp`
man $1 > $tempo ; vi $tempo

This script uses temporary files which I guess work fine, but I was wondering if there was a good way to read man pages in Vim without resorting to creating temporary files

Solution

For some reason, it seems that vim isn't able to read the output of programs through piping […]

According to the man-page, you need to specify a file of - to get it to read from standard input; so:

man ls | vi -

If that doesn't work, you might try using process substitution:

vi <(man $1)

which creates a sort of pseudo-file and passes it to vi.