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c-blake / cligen

Nim library to infer/generate command-line-interfaces / option / argument parsing; Docs at
https://c-blake.github.io/cligen/
ISC License
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Feature request: allow to supress --help/--help-syntax #133

Closed kraptor closed 4 years ago

kraptor commented 4 years ago

This might be already documented/requested, but I didn't find anything how to do it. Is it possible to hide automatically injected flags like --help or --help-syntax?

I tried the following, but it doesn't work (obviously):

dispatchMulti(["multi", help={"help-syntax": "SUPRESS"}])
c-blake commented 4 years ago

It is not possible and it has also annoyed me in a dispatchMulti setting where that text gets repeated over and over.

It is a good feature idea, but maybe a little wobbly as stated. E.g., one might want it run-time switched, only not emitted when called recursively or something, right? So, ./multicmd foo -h would still show it.

c-blake commented 4 years ago

Even more fancy would be to maybe don't list -h/--help if you're invoked via those flags.

c-blake commented 4 years ago

One other wrinkle is that on a per-subcommand basis it is possible to alter the short option corresponding to --help. So, if some command wanted to use ? instead of -h (with that -h for --history/--hash/something) then you might still want to show that line. --help-syntax and -help never change, though.

kraptor commented 4 years ago

In that case, maybe it's better to --help/--help-syntax to be opt-in an/or disabled by a flag to dispatchXXXX, that is recursively kept for multicommands except added by hand?

c-blake commented 4 years ago

Yeah. I will have to sit down with the code and try to figure out the cleanest interface. I'd look for a fix next week.

kraptor commented 4 years ago

I'm not in a hurry, just pointing out something I find interesting before you reach 1.0 as I've seen you wanted to do (from Nim repo comments...)

c-blake commented 4 years ago

Indeed I am getting close to stamping a 1.0..probably this month. This particular feature sounds like something easy to make backward compatible, though. I mean, some people are going to want that --help there all the time for tools like some analogue for multi-commands to the bash complete -F _longopt or whatnot for TAB-completion. (They run the command with help/--help and parse the output. If you want --help-syntax or --help to be TAB-completable then they need to be in that machine-parsed output.)

kraptor commented 4 years ago

Thanks for this! You are awesome, keep the good work.

c-blake commented 4 years ago

You're welcome. I like it, too.

I thought about ditching the newline after the header and the list of subcommands in comprehensive help mode, but eh..That layout and a few other places should probably be extracted into CLI-author overridable files like cligen/syntaxHelp.nim or even a proc that returns a layout string or something. That's all easy to make backward compatible since the existing state of affairs is inflexible. ;-)