darcs

Issue 1260 wrap option lists help to less than 80 characters wide

Title wrap option lists help to less than 80 characters wide
Priority wishlist Status given-up
Milestone Resolved in
Superseder Nosy List btcoburn, darcs-devel, dmitry.kurochkin, jaredj, kowey, mndrix, thorkilnaur, twb
Assigned To
Topics ProbablyEasy, UI

Created on 2008-12-08.02:08:40 by btcoburn, last changed 2017-07-31.00:35:22 by gh.

Messages
msg6789 (view) Author: btcoburn Date: 2008-12-08.02:08:30
Even though terminals can be expanded to fill the screen (and we have bigger
screens nowadays) 80 characters wide is still a standard terminal size. Please
wrap all help lines to be no more than 80 characters long. Currently, help lines
are auto-wrapping making it harder to read the options lists for some commands.
See: darcs whatsnew --help
msg7040 (view) Author: twb Date: 2009-01-11.14:22:28
Currently the options listed by darcs w --help (and others) are auto-generated from a
bunch of shorter strings.  Probably the first step for this bug is to work out all the
places where --help output exceeds 80 columns, then see if it's possible to use a
shorter option description without losing meaning.  (I don't think we can change the
option names themselves.)

In the longer term, it might be useful to have the autogenerator detect long lines and
place the option description below the option name and argument.  (Doing so for all
options would result in a rather long and ugly output, I think.)

It's also worth noting that I have been rewriting the commands' long descriptions
(that is, the stuff that appears below the option list) and I have been trying to keep
it wrapped at 70 columns.
msg8342 (view) Author: kowey Date: 2009-08-22.11:20:22
This sounds a bit infeasible.  But I suggest we

1. Write a script that prints the getopt style output for *all* Darcs.Arguments
This gives us a chance to audit all the options in one go, maybe dumping to a
text file and writing some post-processing filter.

2. Perhaps establish rules of thumb like 'help text should be no more than X
characters' and 'switches no more than N'
History
Date User Action Args
2008-12-08 02:08:40btcoburncreate
2009-01-11 14:22:38twbsetstatus: unread -> unknown
nosy: + twb
messages: + msg7040
2009-08-10 23:53:04adminsetnosy: - dagit
2009-08-22 11:20:28koweysetstatus: unknown -> needs-reproduction
nosy: kowey, simon, twb, thorkilnaur, btcoburn, jaredj, dmitry.kurochkin
messages: + msg8342
title: cosmetic, wrap all help output to less than 80 characters wide -> wrap option lists help to less than 80 characters wide
2009-08-25 17:35:56adminsetnosy: + darcs-devel, - simon
2009-08-27 14:29:19adminsetnosy: kowey, darcs-devel, twb, thorkilnaur, btcoburn, jaredj, dmitry.kurochkin
2012-02-24 05:35:25mndrixsetnosy: + mndrix
2017-07-31 00:35:22ghsetstatus: needs-reproduction -> given-up