Should we remove the capital letter in option helps?

Subprojects LLDB
1

This is something that I put in when we started lldb. Whenever we have to pick something other than the first letter of a long option to be the single character version, I capitalized the letter we picked as a mnemonic. But so far as I can tell, the only thing that’s actually done is every so often somebody tries to fix it as a typo.

If no one else but me has ever guessed what this is for, then it isn’t helping anyone, and somebody with a little free time on their hands should go through and lower case all the options long strings…

2

I was trying to find an example, because I had a half-memory of seeing those, and couldn’t find them by doing helps, but I tried a grep to find some, and maybe my regexp is weak but only could find a couple.

% egrep ' [a-z]+[A-Z]' *td
Options.td:    Arg<"Boolean">, Desc<"Set the breakpoint on exception throW.">;
Options.td:    Arg<"Boolean">, Desc<"Set the breakpoint on exception catcH.">;
%
3

My thoughts reading this:

  • I remember this being explained to me a while ago when I thought it was a typo.
  • It’s happened again, who was it this time?
  • It was me again :smile: (I missed it when reviewing)

I do like the idea in theory, it’s like the _in menu bars when you hold down alt. However without a highlight like that, it does look like a mistake. I doubt anyone has the enthusiasm to make them all a different colour either.

So I’m in favour of removing them.

If there’s no perfect way to find them all, that’s ok, we’ll find them over time. A difference in capitalisation isn’t misleading any users in the meantime.

4

+1

I was actually going to suggest that. Right now we don’t, but we could easily run the help text through FormatAnsiTerminalCodes and use bold or underline to make it stand out. It becomes trickier if you want to make it configurable though. It also wouldn’t work if you have colors disabled.

5