Make hvPlot tooltips useful in modern editors and IDEs

Request

Make sure tooltips shown in modern Editors and IDEs like VS Code and PyCharm are available and useful.

Motivation

I’m trying to help a user of hvPlot here https://discourse.holoviz.org/t/linked-plot-is-exceedingly-slow/3966. I am a user of VS Code. Its just a very slow process helping the user because I need to search and read things on the hvPlot website instead of being able to stay in my editor.

The issue is that the tooltips shown by VS Code are either empty or not useful. My guess is that its because no one has ever considered to make sure the docstrings of hvPlot works in modern editors and IDEs.

The consequence is that hvPlot is much, much harder to learn and work with than it has to be for editor and IDE users.

For me personally the consequence is that it is hard to either introduce a colleague to hvPlot using their favorite tool or hand over existing code. If you just get a code base, you open it in your editor and IDE. And if you don’t know it, its key that you can get information and help immediately.

As hvPlot is recommended as the entry point for HoloViews and the rest of the Holoviz ecosystem it should be the most polished and easy to use framework. But in many ways its actually less polished than the rest of the ecosystem currently.

Examples

hvplot

hvplot has no tooltip

hvplot.pandas

hvplot.pandas has no tooltip

.hvplot

.hvplot has no tooltip

.hvplot.scatter

.hvplot.scatter has no tooltip.

[MarcSkovMadsen]

Regarding Matplotlib documentation. They have the advantage of huge user base and community. So they don’t need to get their documentation nearly as right as HoloViz do. Matplotlib is a standard and benchmark that people will spend the effort to learn just because its recommend and documented in many, many places. hvPlot and HoloViews is starting in a different place.

[MarcSkovMadsen]

Thanks @maximlt . I agree with the above. I will try to make some example PRs to show what can be done, how and the value it creates.