[ESS] Feature Idea: open help in browser when viewing it in an emacs buffer

[Vitalie Spinu]

> In modern emacsen that link to libxml, you could use shr.el
> (which comes with Gnus).  It seems reasonably quick and doesn't
> require forking an external process.
>

Thanks, looks interesting indeed, but could not find anything about
libxml in emacs except this
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/2011-09/msg00027.html
, it's pretty new stuff.

Must admit I was quite confused about the "new" dynamic help system in
R. It's really not that html help supports dynamic substitution of R
code, and text help doesn't
(http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Dynamic-pages).
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that there is close to nothing
of that html help can do and text help cannot.

Some things what are missing:
1) open current help page in external browser
2) quickly jump to index of a package of choice.
3) open links in internal/external browser
4) ???
...

Solutions for 1 and 2 were proposed in previous posts, 3 is a
straightforward emacs configuration
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseUrl.

So what else is needed to completely defeat html help?

Vitalie.