Cmd currently has undocumented support for using the docstrings of 'do_' methods as the documentation for those methods. This is a very convenient facility, except that it leads to documentation being printed with a lot of leading whitespace. I propose to enhance the docstring support to strip the leading whitespace from the docstring, and to document this facility. The proposed stripping algorithm is to strip a number of characters equal to the whitespace on the first non-blank line of the docstring. This means that existing docstrings, which will typically start right after the first """, will be displayed as they were previously, but that a docstring can be formatted by starting the documentation on a new line after the """, and whitespace will be properly stripped. Patch attached with test and documentation update.
The problem with using textwrap is that you'd have to identify paragraph boundaries and example code to avoid messing up the meaning of the doc string. At that point, one might as well go for full ReST markup parsing, and I don't think that is appropriate :)
