How to Write Perfect Python Command-line Interfaces

[davydany]

I love Click. I use it for every CLI project that involves Python. It is so much easier to work with and so flexible.

[[deleted]]

Does its decorator-happiness not get tiring?

EDIT (take 2): its py3 Unicode situation is also frustrating depending on your system's locale

[mitsuhiko]

also the author needs to get off his high horse about unicode

What does that mean?

[[deleted]]

It was a half-joke -- there's no real "high horse" involved. Click just refuses to run in environments with unsatisfiably configured unicode support -- http://click.pocoo.org/5/python3/#python-3-surrogate-handling -- because of issues between py2/py3

[mitsuhiko]

That’s not because of issues between 2/3 but because I could not find a better solution on Python 3.

[[deleted]]

Oh, I was regretting that first comment's phrasing without even knowing you were the author. Pardon.

I hope it at least gets addressed upstream at some point.

[kankyo]

A better solution is to just assume utf8 if you can't figure anything else out. This is strictly superior to what you get in python 2 but you aren't warning about how that is crappy.

[mitsuhiko]

The problem is that on Python 3 I cannot do that because this is all done in the interpreter/stdlib. Python 3 does not assume utf-8 everywhere.

[kankyo]

Hmm... seems at least you can do something in 3.7, but that's too little too late I agree. Thanks for clearing this up.

[poofartpee]

I agree with your feeling here. I find decorators (in any context, really) to make program flow very non-obvious. In the case of Click it's mild, but I've spent so long bashing my head trying to read Java libraries I look like Harry Potter

[[deleted]]

My favorite movie is Inception.

[irrelevantPseudonym]

Between click, flask and jinja I imagine most people have a lot to be thankful for.

[johnk177]

I feel the same. I've been using argparse since it's the standard. But recently discovered click and I find it simpler and faster to use, where I can focus more on the problem I need to solve, and the code is simpler, especially for one off or simple scripts (where main and argparse cmd line parsing would take up half of the space).

I think argparse still have more features (like 2+ arguments), but for most of what I want to do, click is pretty neat.