default short help is too short

[matejcik]

My CLI tool has many commands with help strings. These are single sentences, intended to display on the command list page. I expect that if my terminal is wide enough, program --help will show full help strings for the commands. Instead, they are arbitrarily shortened after reaching 45 characters, regardless of terminal width and max_content_width of the context (as seen in #441).

I think I understand the intention behind separating help and short_help, and shortening the help if no separate short_help exists. I'd expect one of two things, though:

• either applying max_content_width to short help and shortening based on terminal size,
• or using short_help in place of help if the latter is not specified. As in, if I want the short and long help to be the same, then the same string should be displayed both in program --help and program withcommand --help, without me having to specify it twice.

Maybe also something like, make_default_short_help would use first line of long help, or maybe first sentence (help.split(r'\w\.\b'))?

[discosultan]

Do I understand correctly that there is currently no way to specify a width for short help?

[dsully]

Merged #1002

[ixaxaar]

Has this been removed since it was merged with #1008?
#1002 and #936 still persist.