Bonzai! Simple CLI Command Trees in Go

Bonzai command trees are unlike anything you've probably encountered so far, no getopt dashes (we kind of hate them), no ugly commander interface to learn, no 12637 lines of shell tab completion bloat to source before your command will complete, just well manicured nested-tab-complete-with-magical-aliases-enabled commands organized into rooted node trees for your command-line enjoyment. Your right-pinky will be particularly grateful.

Installation

🎉 Bonzai shamelessly requires Go 1.18+ 💋

Install Go 1.18 and the tooling your require for it
go install github.com/rwxrob/bonzai@latest
import "github.com/rwxrob/bonzai"
Consider using the template to get started

😎 Yes, we use the wonderful new generics all over. 👍

Embedded Text or Web Docs FTW!

And, all the documentation for your command tree goes inside the binary (if you want). That's right. Portable, text or web-enabled "man" pages without the man page. You can use one of the composable interactive-color-terminal-sensing help documentation commands like cmd.Help that will easily marshal into JSON, or text, or well-styled HTML locally while enabling you to write your embedded docs in simplified CommonMark. Think "readthedocs" but without the Internet dependency. And if you don't want cmd.Help you don't need it. You can even write your own composable Bonzai command or pick from a rich ecosystem of embeddable Bonzai command trees available from anywhere on the Internet or maintained by the Bonzai project. No registries to worry about. Just use good 'ol Go module imports are all that are need to share your creations.

Contributors/PRs Welcome

... especially for "Completers" and Runtime Detection.

Speaking of sharing, why not send a PR for your addition to the ever growing collection of comp subpackage Completers for everything from days of the week, to tab-driven inline math calculations, to a list of all the listening ports running on your current system.

CONTRIBUTING

"It's spelled bonsai/banzai."

We know. The domains were taken. Plus, this makes it more unique and easier to find once you know the strange spelling we chose to use. Sorry if that triggers your OCD.

On a lighter note, it just so happens that "banzai" means 'a traditional Japanese idiom meaning "ten thousand years" of long life,' a cheer used in celebrations. So combining the notion of a happy, little, well-manicured, beautiful tree and "ten thousand years of long life" works out just fine for us.

Then, of course, there's the image of Buckaroo invoked every time we say the name. In fact, I think we have our new theme song.

What People Are Saying

"It's like a modular, multicall BusyBox builder for Go with built in completion and embedded documentation support."

"The utility here is that Bonzai lets you maintain your own personal 'toolbox' with built in auto-complete that you can assemble from various Go modules. Individual commands are isolated and unaware of each other and possibly maintained by other people." (tadasv123)

Example GitHub Template

https://github.com/rwxrob/bonzai-template

Design Considerations

Promote high-level package library API calls over Cmd bloat. Code belongs in package libraries, not Cmds. While Bonzai allows for rapid applications development by putting everything initially in Cmd Methods, Cmds are most designed for documentation and completion, not heavy Method implementations. Eventually, most Method implementations should be moved into their own package libraries, perhaps even in the same Go module. Cmds should never be communicating with each other directly. While the idea of adding a Channel attribute was intriguing, it quickly became clear that doing so would promote too much code and tight coupling --- even with channels --- between specific commands. Cmds should be very light. In fact, most Cmds should assign their Method directly from one matching the Method function signature in a callable, high-level library.
Only bash completion planned. Zsh, Powershell, and Fish have no equivalent to complete -C (which allows any executable to provide its own completion) This forces inferior dependencies on overly verbose external "completer" scripts written in only those languages for those specific shells. This dependency completely negates any possibility of providing modular completers and composable commands that carry their own completion logic. This one objective fact alone should give every pause before opting to use one of these inferior shells for their command line interactions. Bonzai commands leverage this best-of-breed completion functionality of bash to provide an unlimited number of completion methods and combinations. The equivalent implementations, perhaps as an export collected from all composed commands providing their shell equivalent of completion scripts, would be preposterously large (even though kubectl requires 12637 lines of bash just for its basic completion). Bonzai uses Go itself to manage that completion --- drawing on a rich collection of completers included in the standard Bonzai module --- and provides documented shortcut aliases when completion is not available (h|help, for example).
Bonzai commands may default to cmd.Shell or cmd.Help These provide help information and optional interactive assistance including tab completion in runtime environments that do not have complete -C foo foo enabled.

Style Guidelines

Everything through go fmt or equiv, no exceptions
In Vim set textwidth=72 (not 80 to line numbers fit)
Use /* */ for package documentation comment, // elsewhere
Smallest possible names for given scope while still clear
Package globals that will be used a lot can be single capital
Must be good reason to use more than 4 character pkg name
Avoid unnecessary comments

Acknowledgements

The https://twitch.tv/rwxrob community has been constantly involved with the development of this project, making suggestions about everything from my use of init, to the name "bonzai". While all their contributions are too numerous to name specifically, they more than deserve a huge thank you here.

Legal

"Bonzai" and "bonzai" are legal trademarks of Robert S. Muhlestein but can be used freely to refer to the Bonzai project https://github.com/rwxrob/bonzai without limitation. To avoid potential developer confusion, intentionally using these trademarks to refer to other projects --- free or proprietary --- is prohibited.

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