structopt VS argh

Hope you are aware that structopt is in maintenance mode and is merged into clap as of v3.

As I understood you need to implement a command line argument parser for that you can use clap https://github.com/clap-rs/clap or structopt https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt.

I feel like discovering moves like this is a weakness in the ecosystem today. You can check out some of our discussion on raising visibility

Something I've been giving thought to is how to help structopt users discover that clap3 is their upgrade path. We've put notices in the structopt repo but cargo upgrade and docs.rs won't say anything. See https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt/issues/525 for more ideas we're considering.

For myself, I have found serde.rs really useful for undertanding their derives while I've always been frustrated with finding anything in structopt's documentation, so I modeled it more off of serde. This ended up both being in structure and not being in docs.rs. I think it really was the structure that was the frustration point for me but there was interest elsewhere in moving stuff out of docs.rs.

I think it would be nice to have a comparison to clap-derive and/or structopt in the README, as that is what I expect most users would compare this to. The subcommand handling looks especially cumbersome compared to deriving on structs and enums.

However, the one place I'm a little curious to rewrite things is the CLI... every time we have to deal with cobra I long for Rust's structopt.

Have you tried https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt ?

It is written in Rust using the structopt and swayipc crates. It is published on crates.io. The repository is hosted on GitLab. The repository is mirrored on GitHub.

I use structopt, which itself uses clap.

https://github.com/google/argh is another minimal library for CLI argument parsing that could be in the list

My go-to is argh[1], as it's more lightweight while still providing a nice derive-based API.

[1]: https://github.com/google/argh

It'll panic if the path contains non-UTF8-able bytes.

Yes clap needs a lot of boilerplate that small programs don't always need, but if you're going to simplify it, I don't think having a bunch of arguments given to the main function is better than having an option struct as in argh. Such an option struct can be given to other functions from the main, can have dedicated consistency check or completion methods, etc.

Typically programs are configured through a config object. People like to use things like clap, structopt, or argh for passing in arguments through the CLI https://github.com/google/argh. You can also use the env! macro for embedding values in at compile time, or by going through the std::env::var infrastructure for runtime env vars.

Until the argh crate bumps their version I cannot updater the version on crates.io so the install command currently is: cargo install --git https://github.com/mkatychev/darkroom

Ahh. The secondary reason I discounted Argh as "unsuitable for purpose" after "Doesn't support using OsString under the hood".