Formatting of the usage text

[ericnewton76]

Issue by ajtruckle
Tuesday Sep 05, 2017 at 08:32 GMT
Originally opened as gsscoder/commandline#479

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Is it possible to have more control over how the usage is presented?

For example:

D:\My Programs\2017\OutlookCalIFConsole\OutlookCalIFConsole\bin\Release>outlookcalifconsole -p
OutlookCalIFConsole 1.0.0.0
Copyright c  2017

  -l, --list    Builds a list of available calendars. Eg: -l
                ".\CalendarList.xml"

  -m, --mode    Type of events to add to the calendar. Available modes: mwb.
                Eg: -m mwb

  -p, --path    Path to the events data file. Eg: -p ".\EventsToAdd.xml"

  --help        Display this help screen.```

How can I get it to line up the description nicer? They seem to arbitrarily wrap. I tried using `\n` but then it wrapped to start of the next line.

[ericnewton76]

Comment by fourpastmidnight
Sunday Sep 10, 2017 at 01:44 GMT

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Hmm, I was going to suggest just inheriting from HelpText, but it seems there are no virtual members to override! Perhaps there should be an interface or abstract base class from which we could inherit to provide our own formatting of help text.

I think the HelpText class does provide a mostly good set of defaults, but even I would like to change some details of the output that would be generated by this class.

[ericnewton76]

Comment by ajtruckle
Sunday Sep 10, 2017 at 08:04 GMT

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Yes. The way it is makes it hard to explain the options for some of the switches neatly.