Closed
Description
I think it'd be helpful if we had a way to group commands and options, to create sections in --help.
There's a prior issue to this; #78, but that's over 9 years old. I'm also aware of addHelpText (#1296), but when using that to group commands, it adds boilerplate due to the need of needing to "hide" commands, and later formatting and properly indenting help ourselves.
What I wish to achieve is something like:
Usage: magicbell [options] [command]
Work with MagicBell from the command line
Options:
-V, --version output the version number
-p, --profile <string> Profile to use (default: "default")
-h, --help display help for command
Commands:
broadcasts Manage broadcasts
imports Manage imports
listen Listen to events for a users inbox
metrics Manage metrics
notification-preferences Manage notification preferences
notifications Send and retrieve notifications
push-subscriptions Manage push subscriptions
subscriptions Manage subscriptions
users Manage all known users
Other commands:
config Display or change config values
login Login to your account
logout Logout of your account
help Display help for a command
This separates 'config commands' from 'core commands'. If you'd run stripe --help or gh --help you can see similar command grouping.
At this moment, I achieve the above via:
for (const command of commands) {
program.addCommand(command);
}
for (const command of otherCommands) {
program.addCommand(command, { hidden: true });
}
program.addHelpCommand(false);
const padding = Object.values([...commands, ...otherCommands]).reduce((acc, command) => {
return Math.max(acc, command.name().length);
}, 0);
program.addHelpText(
'after',
`
Other commands:
${otherCommands.map((c) => `${c.name().padEnd(padding, ' ')} ${c.description()}`).join('\n ')}
${'help'.padEnd(padding, ' ')} Display help for a command
`,
);That's doable, but I think it'd be nice to have native support for it. Something like:
program.addCommand(command, { group: 'Other commands' });
program.addOption(option, { group: 'Global flags' });The group can both serve as group title, and grouping key.