Main help should give a hint on how to show subcommand help

[ziggystar]

I've experienced, that it can sometimes be difficult to get to the subcommand help text.

Currently you have to type <subcommand> --help. This is not mentioned on the main help page. Some people might stop here.
Some other people might even try --help <subcommand> and then stop.

I think it is a good idea to add some little text to the main help page to explain how to get to subcommand help.

Now thinking about it, maybe it's not always possible to do <subcommand> --help, depending on whether the subcommand allows help. Is this correct?

Then it might be needed to support --help <subcommand> and note this within the main help page.

What do you think? I might make a pull request if we agree on something. I love this library.

[bkirwi]

Looks like I missed this one when it was originally posted; apologies!

I've experienced, that it can sometimes be difficult to get to the subcommand help text.

Fair!

Now thinking about it, maybe it's not always possible to do --help, depending on whether the subcommand allows help. Is this correct?

It is! (Perhaps unfortunately -- I wanted to do the usual thing by default, and allow users to do something custom if they wished; flexible, but has this downside.)

Then it might be needed to support --help and note this within the main help page.

Normally we're very hesitant to innovate on syntax, and I'm not aware of any other CLI tools that do this.

However! It is very common to have a help subcommand, which with zero arguments behaves like --help or with one argument behaves like <subcommand> --help. It sounds like this would satisfy the same goals in a more standard way.

It's possible to add such a subcommand to your app now, though a bit hacky. Unfortunately it's a bit more awkward to support at the library level --- it involves piping Help objects around in the parser in a way that's not done currently --- but definitely possible with some refactoring in the core.

If anyone's interested in doing that work --- or it's not clear how to do the hacky version in your own app --- happy to discuss more here.