4 ms·

It's probably fuzzy similarity search

• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  If you can bother writing a fuzzy similarity search, you can just short-circuit it on "--help". Most software I see with such problems do neither.
  • ithkuil 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      "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 2y ago
    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.