Currently, IDLE just writes the entire help message into the shell.

If auto-squeezing is enabled, then long help messages are automatically squeezed, following which the help text can be viewed in a text viewer or expanded inline.  This is still not great UX.

I propose to simply have help(object) open a text viewer with the help text.  There's actually an old (2007) comment in Lib\idlelib\pyshell.py by KBK that this should be done.

See related discussion in issue #35855.

See PR GH-15140.

Raymond, I'm interested in your opinion on this.

For myself, I only want this for 'large' outputs.  I prefer something like the following left alone.

>>> help('continue')
The "continue" statement
************************

   continue_stmt ::= "continue"

"continue" may only occur syntactically nested in a "for" or "while"
loop, but not nested in a function or class definition within that
loop.  It continues with the next cycle of the nearest enclosing loop.

When "continue" passes control out of a "try" statement with a
"finally" clause, that "finally" clause is executed before really
starting the next loop cycle.

Related help topics: while, for

The threshhold for squeezer should be good enough.  I think of this as autosqueeze + autoexpand if this if the first output after '>>>' and the statement began with 'help('.  An advantage of doing it this way is that the squeezer button remains after dismissing the viewer.

Also, I suspect that most people who disable squeezer would not like this either.

I should have said, 'who disable autosqueeze'.  Anyway, an option to disable help autoview will make me more comfortable adding it.

A similar change would be to add 'Squeeze & View' to the context menu.