I've rewritten JCLI, and this is the first release where I think
it's useable again: https://code.dlang.org/packages/jcli
Here's a snippet from the README
# Features
* Building:
* This library was primarily built using
[Meson](https://mesonbuild.com) as the build system, so should be
fully integratable into other Meson projects.
* All individual parts of this library are intended to be
reusable. Allowing you to build your own CLI core using these
already-made components, if desired.
* All individual parts of this library are split into sub
packages, so you can only include what you need if you're not
using the main `jcli` package.
* Argument parsing:
* Named and positional arguments.
* Boolean arguments (flags).
* Optional arguments using the standard `Nullable` type.
* User-Defined argument binding (string -> any_type_you_want)
- blanket and per-argument.
* User-Defined argument validation (via UDAs that follow a
convention).
* Pass through unparsed arguments (`./mytool parsed args --
these are unparsed args`).
* Capture overflowed arguments (`./mytool arg1 arg2 overflow1
overflow2`)
* Automatic error messages for missing and malformed
arguments.
* Commands:
* Standard command line format (`./mytool command args
--flag=value ...`).
* Automatic command dispatch.
* Defined using UDAs, and are automatically discovered.
* Supports a default command.
* Supports named commands that allow for multiple words and
per-command argument parsing.
* ~~Support for command inheritance~~ (currently broken).
* Only `structs` are allowed for the moment.
* Help text:
* Automatically generated with slight ability for
customisation.
* Works for the default command.
* Works for exact matches for named commands.
* Works for partial matches for named commands.
* Arguments can be displayed in organised groups.
* Utilities:
* Bash completion support. (will be reimplemented soon)
* Decent support for writing and parsing ANSI text via
[jansi](https://github.com/BradleyChatha/jansi).
* An ANSI-enabled text buffer, for easier and efficient
control over coloured, non-uniform text output.
In the future I'd like to get a few things done, namely:
* Reimplement bash completion.
* Reimplement command partial match completion (right now it'll
just display every command known)
* Maybe add back in dependency injection and a basic
configuration interface, but I'm not sure it was ever really
useful.
* Add more tooling for text output. Progress bars, tables, etc.
* Figure out how I want to handle arguments that are of an array
type. Currently because arg binding is extensible you can
implement your own solutions, but I'd like a default, built-in
one.
* Make sure there's no leftovers in the README of the pre-rewrite
version of JCLI.
Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
