Bonzai, Well-Tended CLI Command Trees for Gophers

Bonzai commands are unlike anything you've probably encountered so far, no getopt dashes, no ugly commander interface to learn, no 12637 lines of shell tab completion bloat to source before it will work, just well manicured commands organized into rooted node trees for your command-line, nested-tab-completing enjoyment with built-in (optional) help documentation that can easily be marshalled into JSON and presented either as text or well-styled HTML. Think "readthedocs" but served locally from your Bonzai command-line apps themselves.

"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.

Example GitHub Template

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

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.

Legal

Copyright 2022 Robert S. Muhlestein (mailto:rob@rwx.gg)
Licensed under Apache-2.0

"Bonzai" and "bonzai" are legal trademarks of Robert S. Muhlestein but can be used freely to refer to the cmdbox 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.