zio-cli VS picocli

>It would almost be easier to modify the bash source itself to read and use a regular grammar

It's an interesting idea that we're using for zio-cli [1].

[1] https://github.com/zio/zio-cli/pull/119

I know this is at very early stage, no docs, not recommended for prod use but you may want to add zio-cli into your watch list.

Picocli allows using a compiler annotation processor to generate classes at compile time instead [0].

[0]: https://github.com/remkop/picocli/blob/main/picocli-codegen/...

Picocli is a pretty good one for writing CLI apps

"and there are simply no good command line input parsing libraries for Java."

Looks like author missed the most obvious and popular OSS one: https://picocli.info/

The command line example gave me the "ick". It is usually preferrable to parse the command line arguments into one instance of a custom "command class", rather than into a list of things. Like jcommander, picocli or jbock do.

Complex argument parsing needs to be auto-generated by libraries like picocli. Even if you need something custom, it'd be quicker to write an Annotation processor from scratch than editing that file.

https://github.com/remkop/picocli

"Picocli-based applications can be ahead-of-time compiled to a GraalVM native image, with extremely fast startup time and lower memory requirements, which can be distributed as a single executable file."

https://picocli.info/quick-guide.html

Using picocli to handle your command line options gives you the best chance to automatically generate an ArgumentCompleter script in the future, but won't help you today (other than possibly making your command line handling more standardized & easier).

Picocli

Then we released a JBang! and picocli based cli that would be, on any OS running a jvm runtime :

picocli : "a mighty tiny command line interface"