For what it's worth, my pull request to ESS to add support for using '?' in the Julia REPL for documentation lookup was merged into master earlier this week, so if you update, that should work now! The docstring comes up in a new help buffer (like ESS's R REPL) rather than just being printed like in Julia's native REPL. Also, the prompt doesn't change to help?>... it seemed to be a Julia trick, so I didn't really spend much time trying to get it to work.
I was also pretty unhappy about the help() function disappearing in 0.4, but I learned that you can use the @doc macro just as easily. E.g. julia> @doc fft instead of julia> help(fft) I hope this is helpful to some of you! Regarding having a Swank/SLIME-like backend, I think this would be really cool and would be very interested in contributing, if I can. But I don't really have any experience designing or implementing something like that.
