Improve UX for Swift Package Manager CLI

Development Package Manager
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7

Hi @tomerd @ktoso, thanks a lot for the feedback!
@tomerd suggested some potential improvements and I have some questions about them.

  • Graphical output for dependency graphs

    • There is already this option in SwiftPM that was suggested In this post and its pull request is already merged. It can be accessed by typing: swift package show-dependencies
      image

  • Audit inputs for consistency on language and style

    • can you give me more details about this?

  • Making options type-safe

    • (do you mean, for example, giving the user Y/n option to confirm the option?

  • Logical grouping

    • (what exactly should I group?)

  • Expanding and improving the help and usage explanations

    • I have done some research and I have some ideas for this, like displaying the most common flags and commands at the start of the help text and ranking them by the most common ones like the image below.
      image

  • Improved progress indicators

    • does making indicators like the one in the image below is acceptable?
      image

  • There are also several general UX improvements I would love to hear your opinion about:

    • Using formatting in help text, bold headings make it much easier to scan.

      image
      image856×608 22.9 KB

    • Adding colors to highlight some text so the user notices it, or use red to indicate an error. SwiftPM already has the Color4 enum to change the color of the output, so we only have to know where to apply different colors related to the context.

The last question, this project is estimated to be 175 hours, should I design my timeline in my proposal for 4 weeks or more?

Thank y'all for bearing with me up to this point :smile:

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