@mcc well, it'll invoke the program named by the option variable 'keywordprg', but 'keywordprg', like other options, can be given a different value for each buffer, and usually this will happen automatically (like, there's an autocmd for it) and set according to the 'filetype' (text, help, c, cpp, rust, etc).
So e.g. if the filetype is 'text', in my config 'keywordprg' is ':Man'; if the filetype is 'help', 'keywordprg' is ':help' (which makes it easy to navigate the help pages).