Allow conditional private commands

[wouterfranken]

Description

Hello,

Thanks for this great tool!

I have a CLI that operates in two modes: normal or interactive (using rlwrap). Some of my commands only make sense in one of the two modes, eg. 'quit' to exit out of the interactive mode or 'interactive' to enter interactive mode. It would be useful to hide these commands from help and from completions on some dynamic condition (eg. an environment variable that is set or not). This would avoid any clutter, both in completion and in the help message.

[DannyBen]

Isn't this what you are looking for?
Setings.private_reveal_key

When using private commands, flags, or environment variables, you may set this option to a name of an environment variable that, if set, will reveal all the private elements in the usage texts, as if they were public.

# settings.yml
private_reveal_key: ADVANCED_FEATURES

and the example code for that feature.

[wouterfranken]

As far as I understand this will show all private commands in usage texts. But I want some private commands to be revealed only when an environment key is set and other private commands to be revealed when another environment key is set. Moreover it would be handy if this would also work for the completion, not only the usage texts.

An example:

• When my cli sets CLI_INTERACTIVE_MODE=1, it would reveal the quit command but hide the interactive command
• When my cli sets CLI_NORMAL_MODE=1 (or even unsets CLI_INTERACTIVE_MODE), it would reveal interactive but hide quit command.

[DannyBen]

This variable lets your users (or your interactive mode) show all the private commands.
There is no way to show just some private commands. The cost of adding such functionality will most likely outweigh the seemingly niche benefits.

A different approach you may want to consider:

1. Show all your commands always.
2. Put all interactive commands under a group, call it "Interactive Commands"
3. Put a filter on these commands to prevent them from running in non interactive mode.

I think this can be a clean and simple solution that is easy to maintain, and easy to understand by the users. Zero acrobatics.