Allow grouping of commands

[loilo]

It's amazing that we have the possibility to group options under a certain headline.
It would be great though to be able to do the same with commands.

In case anyone's not convinced how that would be useful, I'll explain my personal use case:

I made a CLI tool that has some built-in commands but is pluggable in a way so commands can be added from outside.
I'd like to kind of set apart those commands from the built-in ones in the --help, maybe under a "Plugins" headline.

The most convenient way in my eyes would be to be able to group commands.

What do you think?

[nexdrew]

I like this idea. Unfortunately I think the commands API is a little cumbersome when it comes to adding new features (the latest at the time of this writing was command aliases).

For command modules, it's no problem, but for non-module commands, we have to either get creative or come up with a better API (something other than just tacking on new method arguments).

I'll give this some thought.

[loilo]

I thought so, that's the reason I didn't come up with a concrete example how that might look myself.
Just taking a glimpse at it there wasn't a quick way that would not have conflicted with the grouping of options.

[wmnnd]

Would you accept a pull request that adds commandGroup(opts, groupName) that would work like group(opts, groupName) but for commands?

[itai-codefresh]

Any updates about this?
It is a very needed feature.
@wmnnd will you be able to expose your code so maybe we can use it?

[wmnnd]

@itai-codefresh Nope, I ended up using nopt instead. You can check out dblsqd-cli to see how I implemented it.

[quilicicf]

That feature would be awesome indeed. I tried looking at the code to see if I could come up with an implementation but there are things I don't quite understand in the code.

From what I gather, a method commandGroup should be added in yargs.js. That method should work like group does but for commands, with a getCommandGroups method to get them.

Where I'm getting lost is with the preservedGroups and freeze stuff. I don't see tests related to that part of the code which makes it a bit harsh to understand.

I could probably try to implement something but I guess I'd need a little helping hand.

[lodo1995]

@nexdrew is there any news on this? It would be a great feature.

If providing the feature only for command modules is easy, you could start by providing only that; it would still be better than nothing.

For the non-module way of adding commands, I would suggest either groupCommand(<command-name>, <command-group>), mirroring group(<option-name>, <option-group>), or startGroup(<group-name>), which would put all subsequently defined commands in the group.

[bcoe]

I continue to think this would be a slick feature, if anyone wants to take it on.

[hungluu]

+1 on this. I recently built an extensible CLI app with growing number of commands. The command groups (with an alternative / or customisable --help's command list generation) will make make things more comprehensible.

[chrfrenning]

+1 - still relevant 2ish years later - anything that grows beyond 4-5 commands will benefit from this in terms of usability.

[JacobMGEvans]

+1 still relevant, many commands in the CLI we are building.

[jcs090218]

+1