Default verbosity level

[agazso]

By default there is a lot of information printed on the console. It would be better to change the default verbosity level to 1 to keep it a bit down. Then if someone needs more information (for example when debugging) they can always set the verbosity level higher.

[nugaon]

Personally I think that the verbose version should be kept default because it continuously informs the user what is happening which is always good.

[AuHau]

I would argue that the common approach to this from pretty all CLI applications and especially UNIX utilities are that you output only "the results" and have flags like -v to enable more details. This is especially important if you want to use it in some scripts and use piping to other commands. From this perspective it would be good to also have flag like --no-color or something like that, that would strip the colors chars from the stdout, but I guess it is not as critical.

I can imagine use cases like swarm-cli upload /some/dir | mail attila@ethswarm.org which won't be possible if you can't get only the resulting hash.

[nugaon]

for that to set verbosity to 0 would be the way to do, because provide totally silent option is non-sense.
on upload verbosity 0 currently gives back the uploaded hash of the content, but unfortunately it also prints the progress bar which ruins this behaviour and it is not intended to be like this.

[significance]

+1 for automated use

there is also the example of curl which is semi-verbose as default but has a -s option for automated use

[significance]

another perhaps pertinent consideration could be how errors are communicated to the caller in bash, so that we can e.g. retry if upload fails when used in shell scripting

[nugaon]

another perhaps pertinent consideration could be how errors are communicated to the caller in bash

In case of errors it exits from the application with code 1 every time. 
If some unexpected calling format has been given, we print the manual of the command which went wrong and the error message in the last row.
The Other case, when the run() method fails we print an error message with red colors, maybe with some info at the end, which depends on the verbosity level. It also throws 1 error code, that the CLI can react on (you can try out by calling swarm-cli upload some/folder/path && echo 'successful run'.

[nugaon]

there is also the example of curl which is semi-verbose as default but has a -s option for automated use

as I mentioned in my comment #26 (comment) verbosity 0 is for automated usage. nevertheless if it is not intuitive for most of the users, we may introduce an alias for -v 0.

[agazso]

In many CLI tools I worked with there was a -q or --quiet option for minimal output and the -v or --verbose option for the verbose output. We can adopt that.

[agazso]

The original issue about default verbosity is fixed, follow the discussion about the new options in #54