> If your help text is long, pipe it through a pager.
> Use formatting in your help text.
So reimplement man in a non-standard way? No thanks. Keep --help short and concise and then have a separate man page with all the details. Don't just ignore standards and conventions because not all operating system agree on them.
The languages of the the argument parsing libraries listed (Go, Node, Python, Ruby) is also kinda suspect when many such tools are written in C.
> Use symbols and emoji where it makes things clearer.
Eww. And the example is pretty bad too with a number of meaningless icons.
> By default, don’t output information that’s only understandable by the creators of the software.
Except people with post the default output if they are having problems and having all useful information here saves having to ask for it. Also, don't underestimate your user's abitlity to understand stuff.
> Use a pager (e.g. less) if you are outputting a lot of text.
> A good sensible set of options to use for less
Stop right there. If you going to automatically use a pager, at least use the preferred one the user has specified in their environment. $PAGER is even mentioned later in the environment variable section.
> If your help text is long, pipe it through a pager.
> Use formatting in your help text.
So reimplement man in a non-standard way? No thanks. Keep --help short and concise and then have a separate man page with all the details. Don't just ignore standards and conventions because not all operating system agree on them.
The languages of the the argument parsing libraries listed (Go, Node, Python, Ruby) is also kinda suspect when many such tools are written in C.
> Use symbols and emoji where it makes things clearer.
Eww. And the example is pretty bad too with a number of meaningless icons.
> By default, don’t output information that’s only understandable by the creators of the software.
Except people with post the default output if they are having problems and having all useful information here saves having to ask for it. Also, don't underestimate your user's abitlity to understand stuff.
> Use a pager (e.g. less) if you are outputting a lot of text.
> A good sensible set of options to use for less
Stop right there. If you going to automatically use a pager, at least use the preferred one the user has specified in their environment. $PAGER is even mentioned later in the environment variable section.