[IPython-dev] %page help(x)

[Fernando Perez]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Mark Voorhies <mark.voorhies at ucsf.edu> wrote:
> P.S.: If I get this working, is it worth a pull request, or is this the sort of thing
> that should live in personal magic?

I never use help myself, so I'd never really cared.  But I now see
that in the qtconsole, help() is kind of useless, because it doesn't
know how to page.  It's going to be equally useless in the notebook.

So perhaps the right solution is to build our own replacement for the
built-in help(), that is smarter about the clients it's in and that in
the long run could also format doctrings into html with TeX, etc...

I don't know how far you want to take it, but there's definitely
potential here to improve the situation regarding interactive help.
I'd suggest you play with it locally first, and if you think you do
want to build something more robust/general, then we'd definitely be
happy to take a PR for it.

Cheers,

f