Prohelp: Progressive CLI Help

Progressive & Professional Help CLI Interceptor and Library.
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About The Project

The standard command-line help interface (--help or help) is broken. It dumps massive walls of unreadable text — and shell help refuses to cover PATH binaries.

Prohelp is a progressive help specification and reference library: a professional-grade, budget-enforced terminal documentation system with Unicode box panels, locale-aware rendering, and an optional full-screen TUI. It also installs a shell help function (bash/zsh/fish/nu/pwsh — not cmd) that keeps builtin help for builtins and routes PATH topics through prohelp/man/info.

Docs for the wrapper: https://openshellorg.github.io/prohelp/shell-help.html

Prohelp is not a full command-line application framework. It solves progressive help only. For building CLI tools, use a framework and wire Prohelp in.

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Installation

Prerequisites

• D Compiler (DMD or LDC)

• DUB (D Package Manager)

Build

dub build -c executable

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Usage

CLI usage

prohelp
prohelp ?
prohelp ?:i

Preview mode (schema interpreter)

prohelp examples/tar.sdl ?
prohelp examples/tar.sdl ? operations
prohelp -f myapp/help.sdl ?:de,i

Shell help wrapper (recommended)

prohelp wrapper install          # bash/zsh/fish/nu/pwsh — not cmd
prohelp wrapper status
# reload shell, then:
help tar

Drop-in intercept (library)

import prohelp.intercept;

void main(string[] args) {
    if (prohelp.intercept(args)) return;
    // Your CLI framework or hand-rolled parser continues here...
}

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Key Features

• Default Static Box Zoning: Generates gorgeous, Unicode-boxed information panels compatible with pipes, redirects, and log files.

• Opt-in TUI Viewport: Full-screen terminal browser with filter search and keyboard navigation.

• 1-Line Integration API: Drop into standard application main entries with a single line of code.

• Hierarchical Globbing (*): Subtree glob extraction for targeted documentation chunks.

• Multilingual Localization: Native OS locale auto-detection with explicit overrides.

• Sliding-scale Line Budgets: Enforces strict screen boundaries during development.

See Changelog.

License

Prohelp is licensed under the Prohelp Copyleft and Disclosure License (PCDL) Version 1.0.

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Contact

Open Shell Org — openshell@devcentr.org

• Project: https://github.com/openshellorg/prohelp

• Site: https://openshellorg.github.io

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