Picocli: No issues at all - an amazing piece of software :-)

[sgoeschl]

Hi Remko ,

just wanted to state the obvious - "picocli" is an amazing piece of software. So I added a big "thank you" here instead of the usual issues / bugs :-)

Siegfried Goeschl

[remkop]

Haha!
Thank you!
Should I resolve this as “won’t fix”? :-)

[sgoeschl]

Well, either "won't fix" or "done" ...

[ddsharpe]

I second that! Well done! Thank you @remkop

[remkop]

@sgoeschl @ddsharpe
‪Sorry if this is a bit late, but I want to ask 2 things:‬
‪* What is it about picocli that makes you happy with it?‬
‪* What would you do if picocli did not exist?‬
‪

[sgoeschl]

I used Apache commons-cli on a couple of command-line applications (mostly together with Groovy) and usually had some minor (but at least for me annoying) issues - e.g. to trigger online help without error message when mandatory command line arguments are defined. Having said that it is very likely my mistake - I could have spent more time on the documentation, maybe this was an issue fixed ages ago or I was not smart enough to fix my problem.

Some background: last year I migrate my Groovy & commons-cli code

• I noticed the Groovy is promoting picocli
• Since I migrated the Groovy code to Java I hat to touch command-line processing code anyway
• I decided to give picocli a chance (while not being entirely eager to do so)

The things making me happy

• The examples & documentation got me going in short time - basically worked out of the box
• Whenever I need another feature I found it in the documentation and got it working, e.g. version provider

On an even more subjective level

• You clearly wanted to solve command line processing for JVM and put it in a tremendous amount of effort for a rather "un-sexy" topic
• I really appreciate that since I know the pains of doing open source work

Without picocli I still would use Apache commons-cli :)

[ddsharpe]

Prior to using picocli, I used custom CLI code for each project. Occasionally, I would use Apache commons-cli but found it too cumbersome for most things. The number one benefit of picocli was the speed of getting started. I was able to take a large number of parameters and jump right in to the business logic of my tools without having to spend a lot of time coding the parsing and basic validation. The second benefit was the support of command line completion that I never had in any of my tools before. Although, this feature still seems broken on Mac when certain characters are on the command line (like @).

[remkop]

@sgoeschl @ddsharpe Thank you for the feedback!

@ddsharpe autocompletion improvements (positional parameter completion, MacOS improvements, and cleaned up shellcheck warnings) will be in the upcoming picocli v4.2.0 release. You can test by checking out the latest master and building with:

gradlew clean publishToMavenLocal

That should publish picocli-4.2.0-SNAPSHOT to your local .m2 Maven cache. You can then try this in a project that uses the info.picocli:picocli:4.2.0-SNAPSHOT dependency. Feedback very welcome!

[remkop]

@sgoeschl and @ddsharpe Thank you again for your feedback! 😃 ❤️