It would work, but it has significant downsides as it causes mess in the repo. Hopefully some day you'd be able to just include Elgg for testing in your plugin project itself. See https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/issues/7721

It all automatically works of you do it in the way you describe!

For jQuery, you should still require it in your amd module with

var $ = require('jquery');

Thanks Evan. will do

Use http://reference.elgg.org. It shouldn't forward you to https anymore.

Thanks Brett.

I can get there in Chrome but Firefox still gives the security exception

I'm getting same thing, looks like learn.elgg.org  is displaying blog posts.