clirunner VS jc

I love Click for building Python command line interfaces (CLI). One useful feature Click provides is a CliRunner() helper class for testing. CliRunner invokes the script in an isolated environment allowing you to pass arguments, etc. Occasionally I work on projects that don't use Click. For example, if I want to provide a python3 -m packagename script that is ancillary to the primary use case and don't want to include Click as a dependency or want something that can be distributes as a stand-alone script without dependencies. In this case I'd usually use argparse. However, CLIs built with argparse (or old-fashioned manual sys.argv parsing) aren't nearly as easy to test. Thus I created clirunner which is a port of Click's test helper to work with non-Click apps. The API is compatible with Click's CliRunner so if you ever move a project to use Click, the tests should need little to no modification.

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc - "CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq and simplifying automation scripts."

> I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

You should try PowerShell. It's basically Microsoft's .NET ecosystem molded into an interactive command line. I'm not entirely sure if PoweShell can make full use of the static types that build up its core, but its ability to exchange objects in the command line is almost unmatched.

On Linux you can use `jc` (https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) combined with `jq` (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) to glue together command lines.

In addition to my previous comment about jq-like tools, I want to share a couple other interesting tools, which I use alongside jq are jo [0] and jc [1].

[0]: https://github.com/jpmens/jo

[1]: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

> I wanted to write some wrappers for the standard commands that automatically did all this via `jq`.

If you're not already aware of it, you may wish to check out `jc`[0] which describes itself as a "CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq..."

The `jc` documentation[1] & parser[2] for `ls` also demonstrates that reliable & cross-platform parsing of even "basic" commands can be non-trivial.

[0] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

[1] https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/docs/parsers/ls

[2] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc/blob/4cd721be8595db52b6...