plumbum

CLI11, a powerful library for writing beautiful command line interfaces in C++11, has been updated to 2.0. A lot of deprecated things have been removed, and there was a lot of cleanup under-the-hood; making CLI11 simpler. A few defaults have changed slightly, like better TOML support by default.

CLI11 does a better job than ever understanding any sort of container you provide - complex numbers are natively supported, along with atomic types. A long requested feature, simple version flags, has been added. Subcommands are more customizable. And there have been quite a few bugfixes for rare issues.

CLI11, a powerful library for writing beautiful command line interfaces in C++11, has been updated to 1.6, the largest update ever. CLI11 output is more customizable than ever, and has a better functionality separation under the hood.

CLI11 has had the formatting system completely redesigned, with minor or complete customization of the output possible. Configuration files reading and writing also can be configured; a new example with json instead of ini formatting is included. Validators (finally) have custom help output, as well. Many odd corner cases have been made possible, such as interleaving options.

CLI11, a powerful library for writing beautiful command line interfaces in C++11, has been updated to 1.3, the largest update ever. CLI11 is more powerful than ever, and has simpler and more consistent parsing under the hood.

This version focused on refactoring several key systems to ensure correct behavior in the interaction of different settings. Most caveats about features only working on the main App have been addressed, and extra arguments have been reworked. Inheritance of defaults makes configuring CLI11 much easier without having to subclass. Policies add new ways to handle multiple arguments to match your favorite CLI programs. Error messages and help messages are better and more flexible. Several bugs and odd behaviors in the parser have been fixed.

CLI11, a powerful library for writing command line interfaces in C++11, has just been released. There are no requirements beyond C++11 support (and even <regex> support not required). It works on Mac, Linux, and Windows, and has 100% test coverage on all three systems. You can simply drop in a single header file (CLI11.hpp available in releases) to use CLI11 in your own application. Other ways to integrate it into a build system are listed in the README.

The library was inspired the Python libraries Plumbum and Click, and incorporates many of their user friendly features. The library is extensively documented, with a friendly introduction, a tutorial filled (in progress) GitBook, and more technical API docs.

I’ve been working on a color addition to Plumbum for a little while, and I’d like to share the basics of using it with you now. This library was originally built around a special str subclass, but now is built on the new Styles representation and is far more powerful than the first implementation. It safely does nothing if you do not have a color-compatible systems (posix + tty currently), but can be forced if need be. It is included with Plumbum, so you don’t have to add a requirement for your scripts that is non-essential (as color often is). It is integrated with plumbum.cli, too. Also, I’ve managed to accelerate the color selection algorithms about 8x, allowing near game-like speeds. (see the fullcolor.py example).

Scripting in Bash is a pain. Bash can do almost anything, and is unbeatable for small scripts, but it struggles when scaling up to doing anything close to a real world scripting problem. Python is a natural choice, especially for the scientist who already is using it for analysis. But, it’s much harder to do basic tasks in Python. So you are left with scripts starting out as Bash scripts, and then becoming a mess, then being (usually poorly) ported to Python, or even worse, being run by a Python script. I’ve seen countless Python scripts that run Bash scripts that run real programs. I’ve even written one or two. It’s not pretty.

I recently came (back) across a really powerful library for doing efficient command line scripts in Python. It contains a set of tools that makes the four (five with color) main tasks of command line scripts simple and powerful. I will also go over the one main drawback of the library (and the possible enhancement!).