Feature: Default inputs to current directory when no arguments are provided

[shaanmajid]

Pre-submission checks

• I am not reporting a bug (crash, false positive/negative, etc). These must be filed via the bug report template.
• I have looked through both the open and closed issues for a duplicate request.

What's the problem this feature will solve?

Running zizmor without any arguments currently produces a clap required argument error.

In practice, I would assume that the most common local invocations are zizmor . from either a repository root, root/.github/, or root/.github/workflows. This is a small paper cut that adds friction to the most common use case, in particular for new users.

Since zizmor is a single-purpose command (i.e. it has no subcommands), there's no ambiguity about what the user wants when they type zizmor. Users who want to learn more will type zizmor --help.

Describe the solution you'd like

Check the current working directory by default when the inputs argument is omitted. In other words, change inputs from #[arg(required = true)] to #[arg(default_value = ".")] so that bare zizmor behaves identically to zizmor ..

Additional context

This proposal would behave similarly to several existing tools and linters (e.g., actionlint, flake8, ruff check/format), which default to the current working directory when no input is explicitly provided.

[shaanmajid]

This comes down largely to personal preference, so I can see why some might disagree with this proposal. Happy to submit a PR for it though if there's support :^)

[woodruffw]

Hi @shaanmajid, thanks for the feature request.

I'm a -1 on this for personal taste reasons: I personally like it when tools (especially security tools) are as explicit as possible about their inputs. I agree it's a pretty common idiom to default to . when no inputs are given, but IMO the better idiom (in terms of discoverability) is to fail when the user gives no inputs (and additionally spit out the "short" form of the help output).

I'll leave this open for a bit to solicit some other opinions, but by default this is probably something I wouldn't want to add. But thank you nonetheless for the suggestion!

[woodruffw]

(Moving to a discussion once I'm not on mobile.)