If you can bother writing a fuzzy similarity search, you can just short-circuit ...

ithkuil · 2025-02-10T14:33:10 1739197990

I think the idea is that fuzzy search makes it easier for users to spot typos and this is a general feature of the flag library not something specific for --help.

Short-circuit any typo may be dangerous.

Now, an argument can be made for including as many aliases for "help" and "version" as possible but that's a different story

pgwhalen · 2025-02-10T15:56:18 1739202978

You can of course - I think the point here is it's different people with different goals writing the CLI lib vs the application.

So it's often not the case that a single person who made the decision to have a message that says "you asked for help, but you did it wrong; before I give you help you have to ask correctly."

swiftcoder · 2025-02-10T16:40:54 1739205654

"this dependency I picked at random from CPAN doesn't support that" is a pretty weak excuse for shipping a poor user experience

WD-42 · 2025-02-10T18:34:06 1739212446

I don’t think people bother to write them, more likely it’s built in to whatever cli lib they happen to be using and they enable it.