Fang, the CLI Starter Kit (opens in new tab)

GoReleaser is indeed an awesome tool and we use it for every applicable project.

And actually Carlos, who builds GoReleaser, is the true author of Fang and took it from concept to execution.

The difficulty is due to Rust dynamically linking and Go statically linking. The former requires the system libs.

That said, I am unfamiliar with any licensing for Windows builds.

MacOS has some niche (usually discarded) technicalities like you can only use the SDK on Apple hardware.

> One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely.

Bling is easy. Unsexy usability details are hard.

    Z$ time ./example/run
    You ran the root command. Now try --help.
    ./example/run  0.13s user 0.27s system 177% cpu 0.228 total

Why would an example program take 228ms?

    Z$ ./example/run --name='abc def'
    
      Unknown command "def" for "example".                                                            

      Try --help for usage.

Huh? 'abc def' is one shell word. --name=abc works fine.

     Z$ ./example/run --name ''
          
       ERROR  
         
       Flag needs an argument: --name.                                                                 

       Try --help for usage.

But I did give it an argument: the empty string.

And why is the output indented two columns from the left margin anyway?

    Z$ ./example/run ''
    You ran the root command. Now try --help.

    Z$ ./example/run 'x'
          
      ERROR  
          
      Unknown command "x" for "example".                                                              

      Try --help for usage.

Should have produced an error using '' for the subcommand name.

    Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"
    Ran the sub command!

    Z$ ./example/run --help

      A little example program!                                                                         
                                                                                                        
      It doesn’t really do anything, but that’s the point.™                                             

      USAGE  


        example [command] [args] [--flags]                                     


      EXAMPLES  


        # Run it:                                                              
        example                                                                
                                                                               
        # Run it with some arguments:                                          
        example --name=Carlos -a -s Becker -a                                  
                                                                               
        # Run a subcommand with an argument:                                   
        example sub --async --foo=xyz --async arguments                        
                                                                               
        # Run with a quoted string:                                            
        example sub "quoted string"                                            
                                                                               
        # Mix and match:                                                       
        example sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"  


      COMMANDS  

        help [command]                  Help about any command
        sub [command] [args] [--flags]  An example subcommand
        throw                           Throws an error

      FLAGS  

         -a --async                     Run async
         -h --help                      Help for example
         --name                         Your name (jane)
         -s --surname                   Your surname (doe)
         -v --version                   Version for example


    Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"
    zsh: command not found: example sub multi-word quoted string --flag another quoted string

Huh? Why did the command work when I typed it myself but not when I pasted from the help output?

Oh. Because the help output is using nbsp, not regular spaces.

Anyway, command line interfaces have a surprising number of hairy corner cases. I'd rather have boring monochrome that gets them right than an all-colorful theme auto-shell-completion-generating system that doesn't.

If you do it right, you can output plain text when stdout is not a tty - which is something fang does, fwiw :)

A lot of the fancy CLIs I use have a `--json` option that gives the user the chance to pipe output to eg jq and process it there. I find that a good alternative to running stuff through cut, sed or awk before processing.

OP said they want completion support, which Kong doesn't include. https://github.com/jotaen/kong-completion exists, but the last commit was 2 years ago.