Open language-specific (e.g. Python) documentation (i.e. help) in 'Help' viewer

[codingU4EA]

How do I enable language specific help (e.g. Python) in the help console? The links provided there do not provide it and not easy to understand how to see it there. See screenshot.

Version info below:

[juliasilge]

Check out our documentation here on using the Help pane: https://positron.posit.co/help-pane.html

[juliasilge]

We have a feature request for searching in the Help pane tracked in #422. Is that what you mean by "browse"? Or can you say more about what you are looking to do?

[codingU4EA]

Julia, thanks for responding. Let me explain, in Rstudio opening the help panel brings up a menu of resources for helping people use R. See below. This is what I'm proposing for Positron - present the user a menu of help resources for the language (either R or Python.) This allows the user to easily browse resources for the language.

[juliasilge]

Can you say a bit more about what here you have found useful? Or how you typically use this screen in your day-to-day work?

[codingU4EA]

Hi Julia, what's helpful is one-click to help resources like language definitions and packages. I'm a new Python programmer who would find one-click to things like the Python general index documentation, module index, and Python standard library. Nothing exotic. Right now the Positron help screen is mostly a pointer to Posit. What would be helpful for a new user is some browse-able documentation.

[jennybc]

I can certainly see the case for enriching the current help welcome/default screen, so I'm not against that in principle.

But I feel compelled to chime in with something I've learned from hard experience: we do not want to sign up to be a "list maintainer". As in, any sort of list that is explicitly or implicitly understood to be a list of "great Python resources", for example, is guaranteed to get out of date. There's also the question of the implied endorsement that raises the stakes for what's included. IMO if we did anything beyond what we have now, the inclusion/exclusion criteria would have to be extremely clear and hopefully timeless.