Practical Maya Programming with Python

Building the pmhelp function

Python has a built-in help function that, when paired with the REPL described previously, is very useful for rapid exploration.

>>> help
Type help() for interactive help, or help(object) for help about object.

However, help can be difficult to use with PyMEL (along with many other libraries). The documentation may be missing from the actual object, or may be defined somewhere else. Commonly, the documentation is too verbose to read comfortably in a terminal window. And in the case of a GUI Maya session, it is just more convenient to have documentation in your browser than in the Script Editor.

To better use the online documentation, we'll write an minspect.pmhelp function that will link us to PyMEL's excellent online ...