In text communication you need to balance
- Scannability, putting the most important information upfront
- Brevity so people don't get lost in the message
- Softness to help ease people through a frustrating experience
I feel we weren't doing great on the first two points, so tried to
iterate on the messages to improve them. I hope we aren't suffering too
much on the third point as a side effect.
This is an intermediate solution for #4408. As there were no agreeed
upon goals, I went with what I felt read well and that I saw commonly
used on non-clap commands.
- "information" isn't really a necessary word.
- I originally favored `Print this help` but realied that doesn't read
correctly in completions.
- Besides being shorter, the reason for the flipped short/long hint is
it gives people the context they need for scanning, emphasizing
"summary" and "more".
Fixes#4409
In looking at other help output, I noticed that they use two spaces, in
place of clap's 4, and it doesn't suffer from legibility. If it
doesn't make the output worse, let's go ahead and make it as dense so we
fit more content on the screen.
This is a part of #4132
In reviewing CLIs for #4132, I found some were providing helps on `-h`
vs `--help` and figured that could be built directly into clap. I had
considered not making this hint automatic but I figured the overhead of
checking if long exists wouldn't be too bad. The code exists (no binary
size increase) and just a simple iteration is probably not too slow
compared to everything else.
Fixes#1015
In switching to title case for help headings (#4123), it caused me to
look at "subcommand" in a fresh light. I can't quite put my finger on
it but "Subcommand" looks a bit sloppy. I also have recently been
surveying other CLIs and they just use "command" as well.
All of them are commands anyways, just some are children of others
(subcommands) while others are not (root or top-level commands, or just
command). Context is good enough for clarifying subcommands from root
commands.
This is part of #4132
In surveying various tools and CLI parsers, I noticed they list the
subcommands first. This puts an emphasis on them which makes sense
because that is most likely what an end user is supposed to pass in
next.
Listing them last aligns with the usage order but it probably doesn't
outweigh the value of getting a user moving forward.
I see them fulfilling two roles
- A form of bolding
- As a callback to their placeholder in usage
However, it is a bit of an unpolished look and no other CLI seems to do
it. This looks a bit more proefessional. We have colored help for
formatting and I think the sections relation to usage will be clear
enough.
Previous behavior:
- They'd be sorted by default
- They'd derive display order if `DeriveDisplayOrder` was set
- This could be set recursively
- The initial display order value for subcommands was 0
New behavior:
- Sorted order is derived by default
- Sorting is turned on by `cmd.next_display_order(None)`
- This is not recursive, it must be set on each level
- The display order incrementing is mixed with arguments
- This does make it slightly more difficult to predict
