In general emacs with alchemist is capable of showing you documentation and also VS code can.

But this functionallity is very limited, it is only available fur functions and modules that can be resolved unambiguously.

Types of a “thing” (I avoid to say object for a reason!) are even harder. It is a very hard task to infer them from the context. Generating the necessary typeinformation of erlangs base applications takes about 10 minutes on my computer using dialyzer. And even after this information is available, types can get pretty complex, since the way the BEAM deals with them.

Don’t spend lots of time on editing tool. Just pick the one you feel good with.

About understanding the pipe operator : it is exactly how it is explained in all tutorial. Keep playing a bit with it, there tends to be really little happening in elixir. What probably happens is that you overcomplexify your explanation.

Which is normal, it is how our brain is wired if it is hard to understand, it should be complex. Keep playing a bit, yoiu will probably get your mind blown a couple time

I would like to add that IEx is a wonderful tool, with its i, h, v and r helpers. When trying out if ideas work, I usually will write out the basic functionality in a module, then load this in an IEx session with some inputs, before deciding if this is indeed the proper way. If so, then I’ll lock it down by writing tests for it.

But especially when using third party libraries, thr ability to find out how any command works by using h is really wonderful.