Help Viewer

April 26, 2026 · View on GitHub

Sight includes an in-editor help viewer that renders Stata documentation.
Access it through Sight: Open Help Topic (sight.openHelpTopic) in the Command Palette or
by clicking a help <topic> link shown when hovering a command or function
name.

Help Links in Hovers and Completions

Hovering over a built-in command (for example generate), an expression function (for example mi()), or a prefix-command subcommand (for example frame create) shows a clickable help <topic> link. Clicking that link opens the matching .sthlp file in the preview to the right of the editor.

The same link appears in the completion popup for built-in commands and their abbreviations.

Opening a Help File Manually

You can also open a .sthlp file directly in VS Code and open the preview:

Click the Open Preview icon in the editor title bar
Right-click the file and select Open SMCL Preview or Open SMCL Preview (Full Width)
Use the Command Palette: Open SMCL Preview (sight.openSmclPreview)

The preview renders Stata help markup as formatted HTML in a VS Code webview panel.

How Sight Resolves Help Topics

Sight resolves a help topic to a file by searching, in order:

Every directory listed in sight.adoPaths.
Your workspace folders.
Auto-detected Stata install locations (for example /Applications/Stata/ado/base on macOS, /usr/local/stata<version>/ado/base on Linux, C:\\Program Files\\Stata<version>\\ado\\base on Windows), plus the usual ~/ado/personal and ~/ado/plus conventions.

Because of this search order, built-in topics like help regress and help include usually work without extra configuration.

If a .sthlp file is not found, Sight shows a notification with an Open Settings button that jumps directly to sight.adoPaths.