Every Pure Data object has an interactive helpfile opened by right-clicking it and choosing Help

Pd ships an interactive helpfile for every object, which makes it a largely self-teaching environment. Right-click inside an object and choose Help from the menu to open that object’s helpfile — and because the helpfile is itself a Pd patch, you can interact with it, and copy and paste from it just like any other patch. Right-clicking on blank canvas instead opens the List Of Objects (also under Help → List Of Objects), which lists every object available in Pd-vanilla and links to each one’s helpfile. Together these let a learner discover what an object does and browse the full object set without leaving Pd.

Examples

Right-clicking an osc~ object and choosing Help opens osc~‘s helpfile, a live patch you can play and copy from; right-clicking empty canvas opens the List Of Objects.

Assessment

How do you open the helpfile for a specific Pd object, and what makes Pd helpfiles more useful than static documentation? How do you see the full list of available objects?