Documentation viewer

[digitarald]

By making finding and reading documentation easier in VS Code we reduce context switching, make continuous learning more integrated, and make documentation more interactive.

Core concepts

1. Expand the docs shown in API autocomplete to their own space, easier to read and navigate (like Docs View).
2. Look up concepts, tutorials, and guides that don't fit into API docs.

While the secondary side bar available makes the UX a bit easier, the main challenge of making this easy to discover for users who need it, but unobtrusive for .

Expanding on the core concepts

• When documentation is open source, show contribution touch points (like the Edit button in VS Code docs).
• Make source code examples in docs copy-able/interactive/etc with VS Code (including images).
• Educators can create course material to read, run, and complete within VS Code.
• API docs for 1st party and dependencies can be generated by language-specific extensions.
• Extensions could provide endpoints for documentation discovery, like Open Search.

Extensions that provide something similar:

• Laravel Docs
• mdoc - Markdown Documentation Viewer
• JSDoc Viewer
• Ionic Documentation
• Unity Tools offers multiple docs to open via command.
• Tailwind Docs
• Vue docs

Current state of longer docs in suggestions (default off, enabled via ^Space):

• Limited amount of space and overflowing code examples
• Over-scrolling the docs glitches with scrolling the editor

[digitarald]

Could also help with microsoft/vscode-jupyter#1307 , which is now available via https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-toolsai.vscode-jupyter-powertoys

[digitarald]

Closing as it got few 👍 and https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bierner.docs-view solves it.