termcolor VS clap-rs

If you're going after a rice utility, you'll probably want to at least take a look at termcolor

I personally regret adding NO_COLOR support to termcolor. See https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor/pull/63 and https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor/issues/72.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor, 345, 66k Recommended by https://blessed.rs/crates

I'm a little leery of clap taking on the role of color control. I've found that each library with "auto" support does it slightly differently and that really the best place for that policy is in the caller so there is a consistent experience and so it can adapt to the caller's needs. The WG-CLI has talked about this in the past and concolor family of crates is the result. I'm waiting on feedback for termcolor's use case (non-ANSI) before going 1.0 at which point we will probably make this the backend for clap's auto color support.

We will be using the library for Clap - A simple-to-use, efficient, and full-featured library for parsing command line arguments and subcommands.

I recently came across this question (and associated answer) on the clap repository. The answer given is a good one. But I wanted to expand with my own findings and practices, which spurred the motivation for this post.

We can also use tuple-like struct syntax and named-field struct syntax for enum variants within our enum; this is because unlike in other OOP languages, Rust enums are actually sum types. You can read more about how powerful Rust enums are in another article we wrote here. You can have optional arguments by simply wrapping the types in Option, but if you want to add a flag to a command you can use bool, since clap recognises that flags are either there or not there. Let's have a look at what this might look like:

I began by developing a wrapper for the CurseForge API, which turned out to be a lengthy and challenging process but constituted the bulk of the work. Next, I coded the CLI, which was relatively straightforward. Instead of using the clap crate, a Rust tool for generating CLIs, I opted for the following line of code:

By this time I had already gotten tired of parsing arguments by myself and had looked for something to help with that. I found a really dang good argument parsing library called clap. What makes it so cool is it's largely declarative for common uses. You simply mark up a struct with attributes, and the parser automatically generates the usage and all the argument parsing code.

How CLI arguments are handled (using clap).

Is this just referring to wrapping based on the terminal width? That is supported with the wrap_help feature though I have been considering making it a default feature.

CLI, use Clap. If you want to get fancy, use Tui.

As our CLI is getting more complex, we'll use the clap crate to parse the command line arguments.