Needs an integrated help function

[s-edwards]

It would be nice to have a built-in help function/command reference like JES, but pythy doesn't have it. Since some textbooks actually use this style of feature, it would be nice to support.

[allevato]

Would be nice to write a simple script that could auto-generate this from a Python installation; basically just import some modules, iterate over all the functions, and do some processing of their doc attributes to generate a documentation database. That would cover most of the built-ins. Could maybe do the same for media comp using the Python source for that module from JES?

[s-edwards]

That's a good idea. What would the UI be? An interactive help() function on the console? How easy would it be to add clickable function references in the code mirror area? These could either pop up the help info, or open the corresponding on-line python doc for library functions.

[allevato]

There are two different use cases that we need to consider:

• "Intellisense"-like popup help as the user types (IDLE has this)
• General documentation lookup through a GUI or REPL

The CodeMirror website has some good examples of doing auto-completion and just general recognition and hyperlinking of functions/classes, if I remember correctly, so both of those should probably be doable without an enormous amount of work. Both could involve using a popup bubble to display the information about the function, with a link to more detailed docs.

Adding a help() function to the console once it can be turned into an actual REPL would be nice, but I'm not sure students would use that as much as the first two.