[GSoC 2025]What can I prepare for improved command line tool documentation

Development GSoC
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hey, I am a individual developer for iOS. I like Swift and write many blogs for it. I find you have a GSoC project to improve command line tool documentation. So I want to join this project and do something for this feature!

I have some skills for this project:

  • Proficiency in Markdown and CLI: I wrote blog by Markdown 4 years. This is English version build by Jekyll ZhongUncle's blogs - Github Pages. And Chinese version is ZhongUncle's blogs - CSDN, over 715K views.

  • Basic proficiency in Swift, C/C++, also know how to write manual of a command. You can see some projects wrote by Swift in Github

What can I prepare for this project first? Such as a simple markdown parser demo? Because I don't know how to do for such large project.

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Hi @zhonguncle,

Happy to hear that you're interested in the project about improving command line documentation.

This project is about enhancing the output from the generate-docc-reference command plugin in Swift Argument Parser.

One way that you could prepare for this could be to define the interface for a small command line tool (the tool doesn't need to do anything, just define commands with flags and options), run the command plugin, look at the output and think about enhancements that you would like to make to the output.

Once you have a couple of ideas for improvements that you'd like to make you can look at the code for the generate-docc-reference command plugin to try and find what code you'd need to change so that it generates the markup with those improvements.

Getting Started with ArgumentParser defines an example command line tool that you can use to get started. Note that the generate-docc-reference command plugin isn't in a released version of Swift Argument Parser yet, so you'll need to depend on a branch (for example "main" rather than a semantic version).

You can run swift package plugin --list to verify that you have the plugin, and then swift package --allow-writing-to-package-directory generate-docc-reference to run the command plugin.

If the command line tool also uses the Swift-DocC Plugin you can use the preview-documentation command plugin to see a rendered version of the generated documentation.

You can find some more information in this other thread by another person who is interested in the same project.

Note that who gets a project assignment is decided later, based on the project proposals.

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