When one runs “pydoc with”, the output is a block of text marked up with reST.  It would be more helpful to render it as text or HTML thanks to a minimal reST parser and transformer.

In http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-July/101563.html, Martin Geisler (Mercurial dev) said:

“We're using light-weight ReST markup in the Mercurial help texts and
transform it into straight text upon display in the terminal.

We want no external dependencies for Mercurial, so I wrote a "mini ReST"
parser in about 400 lines of code. It cheats a lot and can only handle
simple constructs...” [A few messages later] “I would be happy to relicense it under the Python license.”

So, proposed battle plan:
1) Agree this feature request is desirable.

2) Agree on the inclusion of mg’s minirst, which provides an reST parser and a plain text formatter.

3) Add an HTML formatter.

4) Wire minirst into pydoc.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but an alternative is to modify pyspecific.py so that it generates text output from the ReST when it builds the pydoc topic index.

No need for any of that -- the output you see already is the text output from Sphinx.

Well, in that case, can we change the text style for code and related markup to be something prettier?  Normal single quotes, perhaps?

s/prettier/more readable/

Sure, I can do that for the next version.