In #65824 the "Help on ..." was added in the "less" prompt in pydoc. It works good in the CLI or hen you call help() with a string, but unfortunately, it is not so good for help() used in the REPL with non-string argument. For example, help(str) has a prompt starting with "Help on type ", and help(str.upper) -- "Help on method_descriptor ". In the latter case, the help text itself is started with "Help on method_descriptor:", but this is a different issue.

The proposed PR improves the prompt. It now uses the objects __qualname__ or __name__ if they are available (this covers classes, functions, methods, and many others), and falls back to "{typename} object" otherwise.

Linked PRs

• gh-120541: Improve the "less" prompt in pydoc #120543
• [3.13] gh-120541: Improve the "less" prompt in pydoc (GH-120543) #120562