docopt VS cli-guidelines

Symfony Console closely follows the well-established docopt conventions. Docopt, based on longstanding conventions from help messages and man pages, ensures a consistent and intuitive interface for describing a program's interface. Symfony Console's adherence to docopt conventions guarantees that your command line tools maintain a standardized and predictable user experience, simplifying development and user interaction.

You probably already know, but just in case you don't, you might read about http://docopt.org/ It seems to me a lot of your usage ideas could be refinements of / tooling around docopt-style interfaces.

http://docopt.org/

Not quite what you asked for, but close: type example invocations to generate the CLI, and just pull the arguments from a dictionary at runtime.

I've been using docopt to handle CLI arguments for years now.

http://docopt.org/

If you aren't averse to using a third party package, on my personal projects I always found https://github.com/docopt/docopt to be nice.

You can kill 2 birds with one stone by documenting your scripts while also providing the argument structure / parsing.

As for the implementation differences, complgen uses a trivial DSL that’s everybody is already familiar with more or less because it’s a slightly more rigorous version of what tools usually spit out when you do command --help (projects like docopt even use that for command line arguments parsing). Those happen to be regular languages and therefore can be represented as a Deterministic Finite Automata. complgen compiles the grammars to DFAs, minimizes the DFA and spits out shell-specific shell completions scripts that simply walk the DFA to match and complete the current input.

The current completion system has a list of rules of which completions to use at which time. It's purposely simple to make it as flexible as possible. The current things I'm planning is a derive macro like what clap has to generate these rules. I'm also considering introducing a plugin that let's you write rules in the format of docopt

For anyone unfamiliar, docopt is an established standard for specifying arguments in a script’s doc string. I use it for Python and it’s lovely. You’re going to write a docstring with examples anyway, why not make them functional?

http://docopt.org/

I like http://docopt.org/ a lot. You seem like someone who might have opinions on that.

The Command Line Interface Guidelines [1] says:

> Do not read secrets from environment variables

> Secrets should only be accepted via credential files, pipes, `AF_UNIX` sockets, secret management services, or another IPC mechanism

Which one of these do you use? On github it seems common for projects to use environment variables for secrets.

[1] https://clig.dev/#environment-variables

Seems they took a small step back from their previous "don't bother with man pages" stance. Now it's "Consider providing man pages."

I still find it a rather shocking order of priority, honestly.

https://clig.dev/#documentation

- E. `blah project foo --edit`

Wondering if there was any guidance on this from the UNIX people. Perhaps scoping should be done using the file system. `cd path/to/project && blah edit`. Like git does with `git --cwd=path/to/project`. Maybe a virtual FS could even be used. Then you wouldn't have to continuously type in the scope with each command. Interesting thinking about how to maintain state in the terminal...thinking about how Python's virtual env bin/activate modifies the shell.

Found an interesting guide here: https://clig.dev/

Capturing these guidelines is one of the primary reasons that https://clig.dev/ exists.

You may want to take a look at various existing CLIs to get inspiration on how they operate, the user feedback loop and the ergonomics on using them. Here is a great website on some CLI structing guidance https://clig.dev/