Clon

Cover art by Alexis Angelidis

Repository End-User Manual User Manual Reference Manual

Clon (the Common Lisp / Command-Line Options Nuker) is a library for command-line options management. It is intended to ease the creation of standalone Common Lisp applications by providing a powerful and uniform command-line options interface. The most important features of Clon are the following.

From the application programmer’s point of view

Clon provides centralized command-line options specification and management, including automatic generation of help strings, conversion from command-line / defaults / fallbacks / environment variables to application-level option values, global or on-demand option retrieval, and extensibility (the programmers can define their own option types).

From the application user’s point of view

Clon provides a uniform command-line options syntax across all Clon-powered applications, customization of the help strings layout through themes (with optional ISO6429 coloring on terminals that support it), automatic completion of abbreviated option names and short/long/pack syntax.

Resources

Clon is released under a BSD license and is available in Quicklisp. The documentation (which can be built from the distribution), is provided below.

• The End User Manual is for people who use a clonified application.
• The User Manual is for programmers who want to use Clon in their application.
• The Reference Manual is the exhaustive technical documentation.