I just discovered cloup and it is fantastic!

Thank you! Glad you like it!

would you be interested by my attempt at integrating my extra-highlight logic into cloup's help formatting code?

A more fine-grained theming (metavars and defaults) was something I tried to implement when I first introduced the theming feature! Unfortunately, click is not very well designed when it comes to formatting. Formatting logic is splitted in many components and the so called HelpFormatter is just a low-level formatter. So I ultimately decided to give up or at least to leave a more fine-grained formatting for the future at the time. Even because, in theory, Click should get a new formatting system soon or later (though I'm starting to doubt it'll ever come out), so I didn't want to waste too much time on the current one.

Coming to you proposal, I'm all in for adding the feature, of course, but using regular expressions looks more like a workaround to me :(

A more fine-grained theming (metavars and defaults) was something I tried to implement when I first introduced the theming feature!

Aha, great minds think alike! I guess we both reached the conclusion that finer highlighting increase the readability of help screens.

I just had a look at your bug reports and PRs to Click project. And realized how much work it takes to already have that flexible help in Cloup. Thanks a lot for your dedication and thanks for making Click better!

Now for that extra-highlighting. I understand you do not want to taint Cloup's clean code with ugly regexps. 😉 My rationale was that help screen are not consumed by machine but are designed for human. So a hack was good enough and a good compromise.

Ideally we should have proper fine-grained support of semantics in Click. I guess this is more or less covered by that mega-issue: pallets/click#561

Anyway, feel free to close this issue if it doesn't make sense. I think I'll still try to piggy-back on Cloup in my CLIs and re-adapt my regexps to its logic (depending on my motivation).

Aha, great minds think alike!

;)

I just had a look at your bug reports and PRs to Click project. And realized how much work it takes to already have that flexible help in Cloup. Thanks a lot for your dedication and thanks for making Click better!

Thank you, I appreciate it! It was a lot of work indeed.

Now for that extra-highlighting. I understand you do not want to taint Cloup's clean code with ugly regexps. 😉 My rationale was that help screen are not consumed by machine but are designed for human. So a hack was good enough and a good compromise.

It's totally okay to do that at the application level but it's still a workaround. I've made use of workarounds in Cloup but in this case "there must be a better way" (quote).

Furthermore, I was thinking that maybe rather than improving the console help page, it's better to invest time in generating HTML documentation / man pages and opening the browser when the user runs --help (if there is a browser), as git does.

Anyway, feel free to close this issue if it doesn't make sense.

I'll close this issue and open a new one that references this one, since I'm open to include the feature. Unfortunately I've no time for this right now :(.

FYI, I just release click-extra with all my additional help screen colorization code. It might need some polishing but it is good enough and reasonably tested to be used by others.