If the HTML version of the index to the library documentation (http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/genindex.html in the online version) would contain <A NAME="foo"> anchors at the first entry for the word "foo" in the index this would allow a really nice feature in the IDE (and IDLE, and other ide's): a command "lookup in documentation" that takes the current selection and sends your webbrowser to genindex.html#foo.

Or is there already another way to do this?

An alternative (more work, but would allow more features) would be to dump the information that is in the index in an XML file. During the index generation process there's probably more interesting info available too. And it would allow to search the indexes of multiple docsets at once (library, refmanual, etc).

I'm posting this as a feature request because I haven't even the beginning of an idea how to implement this (in all those years I haven't even succeeded in _building_ the documentation:-).

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The Python 2.4 documentation will provide an XML version of
the index data.  The specific information which can be
captured and the way it's expressed remain to be determined.

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I'll also note that once we have a process for generating
the XML version of the index data, it's likely that we can
apply it to older versions of the documentation to make them
similarly useful.

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At least there's this, and I've got my Xemacs to call it
when I press F5:
http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/pyhelp.cgi

I think the upcoming 2.6 release will provide the necessary functions to
create such a feature.