Could the order of commands and args be more flexible?

[Magicloud]

For example, with following code, I can do tool -s abc pgsql -u def. But not tool pgsql -s abc -u def. Could Clap be set to not restrict the order of global options and commands?

#[derive(Subcommand)]
#[command(rename_all = "lower")]
enum SubCmd {
    PgSql {
        #[arg(short, long)]
        username: String,
    },
}

#[derive(Parser)]
struct Cli {
    #[arg(short('s'), long)]
    secret_name: String,
    #[arg(short('n'), long, default_value = "default")]
    secret_namespace: String,
    #[arg(short('l'), long, default_value = "16")]
    secret_length: u8,

    #[command(subcommand)]
    cmd: SubCmd,
}

[epage]

You can mark arguments with global = true on Cli so they are available within PgSql however I would recommend against it.

Generally, the expectation is that a subcommand is self-contained.

Also, this can lead to confusing situations where a global flag exists but doesn't apply to all commands. This can be a form of false-sharing, much like false-sharing in code when doing DRY or memory when using cache lines.

Since you mentioned "being more flexible", one route would allow arguments under pgsql to show up before the command. Again, that generally breaks expectations, especially in understanding commands because they are expected to be read left-to-right. On top of that, this left-to-right model isn't just for users reading/writing but also for parsing. Parsing of CLIs is context-sensitive. We only know how to process an argument by knowing what has come before. This makes it so we can't pulled out a subcommand and then evaluate all of the arguments, both before and after.

[Magicloud]

Thank you.