rich-cli VS docopt

I hope he doesn't mind, but the creator of Rich and Textualize is a good guy, and Scottish: https://www.willmcgugan.com/about/

https://www.textualize.io/

https://github.com/Textualize/rich

You are using print statements too much. I understand the use due to it being a CLI application but still I suggest you look at textualize.

For more than a year I have been refactoring coBib, getting rid of its original ncurses-based TUI in favor of a more modern and a lot more maintainable textual-based TUI. Developing it has been a lot of fun and I must say that the team over at Textualize is doing a great job at developing libraries which are somehow very powerful and extensible while still being easy to use!

Will McGugan is among the most well-known Python developers. He's the author of Rich, a library for formatting output in the terminal. It's used, among others, by pip, and has more than 40K stars on GitHub. In 2021, Will started building Textual, a TUI (text user interface) framework based on Rich. At the end of the year, he founded the company Textualize.

The future of the command line is something along the lines of what these guys are doing:

https://www.textualize.io

IF you ever wanted to build rich User Interfaces that work in the terminal with mouse support written in Python, then Textual is the Library for you.

If you change your mind about Python there's textual+rich, https://www.textualize.io/.

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.