[hamandcheese]

I like clap a lot, however I find that clap derive is not very easily discoverable. I always have to google for the right macro incantation to get what I want. Whereas editor completions from rust analyzer get me quite far without needing to leave my editor when I'm just using an ordinary library.

I think this is more a criticism of rust-analyzer than clap itself, any macro-heavy library I have similar issues with.

(Yes I know clap can be used without derive, but I'm willing to deal with the pain to parse directly into a struct)

[rendaw]

I hope you don't mind me plugging my thing here, but I had the 100% same problem and made aargvark (https://docs.rs/aargvark/latest/aargvark/). When I was using clap, every time I'd need to look up how to do X, or what combination of things I needed to put an enum here, or find out that this nesting of data types wasn't supported, etc.

It's still derive macro-based, but there's only one derive (`Aargvark`) rather than `Parser`, `Subcommand`, etc, and it can handle any data structure composition orthogonally (although crazy structures may result in fairly awkward command lines).

[jrimbault]

FYI, maybe for you and other readers. My key to really understanding clap's derive macro was to understand that the macros takes as argument every methods of clap's Command struct https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/struct.Command.html

Looking at this resolved most of my issues about discoverability.

[tucson-josh]

I feel like there's a sweet spot for complexity that the derive macro hits pretty well. When things get more complex it can feel like a maze, but below that complexity it's pretty nice.