Proposal: Re-add padding to margins

[ctjlewis]

Could we pretty, pretty please consider readding left/top/bottom padding? Just a little two-space iiiiiiiitty bitty little bit of wiggle room to prevent eye strain?

If you wish to propose changes, make your case in a more civil manner.

I am very sorry for my last issue, where I harshly suggested that we revert a change which moved this tool to "bleeding eyes mode." That was very insensitive of me. It was also harsh of me to criticize the contributor who campaigned vigorously for removing all padding, and for recommending that you "do the opposite of whatever he says." All of this was extremely inappropriate and I am learning to do better.

[shadowspawn]

The changes removing the padding were made with extensive references to other programs which did not have leading or trailing empty lines for the help, or leading spaces before the Usage/Options/Commands titles. I recall being a little surprised at the time (before I was a maintainer) because I was used to the previous behaviour in my own program and had formatted my help additions to match Commander layout. But when I looked around I agreed the changes made Commander's help more consistent with general usage.

The two most familiar are git and npm.

Checking Yargs as the closest peer of Commander. In a small sample program, it does not add leading or trailing empty lines, or leading spaces before the help titles.

Looking at man as the canonical help format, it does not have leading or trailing empty lines, or leading spaces before the help titles. It does have whitespace just after the header and just before the trailer.

What other programs do you use that include left/top/bottom padding?

[shadowspawn]

Coming after the original discussion and changes, there is now an easy way to add leading and trailing text to the help (without subclassing). See .addHelpText().

[shadowspawn]

Related issues: #608 #741 #832 #852 #853

[shadowspawn]

No activity or further information in a month.

Feel free to open a new issue if it comes up again, with new information and renewed interest.