I was trying to get the docstring including style options and plot options programmatically for usage with holoviz-mcp. I spend a long time before I realized that hv.help(hv.Curve) works very differently whether you are in a notebook or using plain python.

It seems the InfoPrinter is only configured and used in a notebook. Which makes hv.help work very differently.

Reproduce

When you run

import holoviews as hv

hv.extension("bokeh")

hv.help(hv.Curve)

You see

Workaround: Set InfoPrinter.store manually

import holoviews as hv
from holoviews.core.pprint import InfoPrinter
from holoviews.core.options import Store

InfoPrinter.store = Store

hv.extension("bokeh")

hv.help(hv.Curve)

Related issues

• hv.help should show the element __doc__ #5421

Wish

In the end the below code should just work for users no matter where they work.

import holoviews as hv

hv.help(hv.Curve, backend='matplotlib')

and

from holoviews.core.pprint import InfoPrinter

info = InfoPrinter.info(obj, ansi=False, backend="bokeh", visualization=True, pattern=None, elements=elements_list)
print(info)