Next Steps
Once your current application is using cmd2
, you can start to expand the functionality by levering other cmd2
features. The three ideas here will get you started. Browse the rest of the Features to see what else cmd2
can help you do.
Argument Parsing
For all but the simplest of commands, it's probably easier to use argparse to parse user input. cmd2
provides a @with_argparser()
decorator which associates an ArgumentParser
object with one of your commands. Using this method will:
- Pass your command a Namespace containing the arguments instead of a string of text.
- Properly handle quoted string input from your users.
- Create a help message for you based on the
ArgumentParser
. - Give you a big headstart adding Tab Completion to your application.
- Make it much easier to implement subcommands (i.e.
git
has a bunch of subcommands such asgit pull
,git diff
, etc).
There's a lot more about Argument Processing if you want to dig in further.
Help
If you have lot of commands in your application, cmd2
can categorize those commands using a one line decorator @with_category()
. When a user types help
the available commands will be organized by the category you specified.
If you were already using argparse
or decided to switch to it, you can easily standardize all of your help messages to be generated by your argument parsers and displayed by cmd2
. No more help messages that don't match what the code actually does.
Generating Output
If your program generates output by printing directly to sys.stdout
, you should consider switching to cmd2.Cmd.poutput
, cmd2.Cmd.perror
, and cmd2.Cmd.pfeedback
. These methods work with several of the built in Settings to allow the user to view or suppress feedback (i.e. progress or status output). They also properly handle ansi colored output according to user preference. Speaking of colored output, you can use any color library you want, or use the included cmd2.ansi.style
function. These and other related topics are covered in Generating Output.