sirraide/clopts

Type-safe, compile-time header-only command line options library for C++20

clopts's Issues

Proper GNU short option parsing

We already sort of support short options, but the way they work is pretty limited atm. Finishing implementing short options entails:

• Parsing short option clusters (e.g. -la in ls -la).
• Parsing short option clusters that contain exactly one option that accepts arguments (e.g. -xvf in tar -xvf .... This option must come last (e.g. tar -fvx is not valid), and as a consequence, it need not be separated from its argument by whitespace.
• Should probably also add an option that lets the user specify whether -- should stop parsing.
• Actually documenting all of this.
• multiple<short_option<...>> does not seem to work at the moment.

Add option to ignore or warn on unknown arguments

Something like:

unknown_error // default, obviously
unknown_warn
unknown_ignore

Implement this as a type that stores an enumerator; we could expose the enumerator, but that would mean 1. more things to check, and 2. unknown<unknown_mode::error> is too verbose, and unknown<error> is just namespace pollution, so there’s no particularly good way of doing that...

[Feature] Add option tags and parse state

Basically, it would be nice to have a feature that lets us attach tags to something, similarly to how the -x option works in Clang:

tag<"-x", "Set the file type", std::string>,
positional<"files", "The files to compile", tagged<std::string, "-x">,

Example:

foo -x t1 bar baz -x t2 quux foobar

Content of "files":

{"foo", ""},
{"bar", "t1"},
{"baz", "t1"},
{"quux", "t2"},
{"foobar", "t2"},

Allow more integer and floating-point types

Allow any type satisfying std::integral or std::floating_point as option types.

Add colours

VLC’s --help and -H printouts look pretty nice; perhaps we could ‘take inspiration’ from that. This would entail:

• Adding some way of specifying colours, probably through a single colo(u)rs<...> type. Also add some default themes because why not.
• Adding another builtin option type (like help<>) that adds a --colo(u)r option that allows users to disable/enable colours from the command line. This should probably passed in together with the colour configuration. It would probably be a good idea if all of the colour configuration is handled via the colo(u)rs<...> type, possibly w/ subtypes.
• Actually implementing the option type in question in the printer, as well as precalculating several help messages.
• By default, it should use isatty() to determine whether or not to print colours.
• Add support for 3×256-bit colours (yes, there are ANSI escape codes for that).

Help message should actually print the description of positional options

Probably after the usage line and before ‘OPTIONS’.

[Feature] `multiple<>` options should return a reference to the vector instead of a pointer