On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 09:10:22AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > People interested may want to try the attached single-liner patch to > see how the output from _ALL_ commands that use parse-options API > looks when given "-h". It could be that the result may not be too > bad. The output is less ugly than I expected, but still a bit cluttered IMHO. I was surprised that the column-adjustment did not need tweaked, but the code correctly increments "pos" from the return value of fprintf, which just works. Looking at the output for --ff, though: --[no-]ff allow fast-forward (default) I do not think it's improving the situation nearly as much as if we made the primary option "--no-ff" with a NONEG flga, and then added back in a HIDDEN "--ff". I thought we had done that in other cases, but I can't seem to find any. But it would make "--no-ff" the primary form, which makes sense, as "--ff" is already the default. Another option would be to teach parse-options to somehow treat the negated form as primary in the help text. That's a bit more code, but might be usable in other places. -Peff