I would love to be able to paste a command into the terminal, add a flag, and have the program explain the options to me and what they mean, like so:

$ ls -I*.txt -S -w120 -1 --explain

NAME
       ls - list directory contents

SYNOPSIS
       ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION
    -I*.txt
        do not list implied entries matching shell `*.txt'

    -S
        sort by file size, largest first

    -w120
        set output width to 120.  0 means no limit

    -1 
        list one file per line.  Avoid '\n' with -q or -b

This would save me so much time, especially for commands with a lot of options and longer man pages. Every new shell program I write will have this feature.

Obviously the --explain flag isn’t perfect because it’s not a reserved word or anything and might collide with an existing program somewhere out there. Maybe ---explain, and we say that triple-dash options are reserved for parser-specific things?

And I feel like you could modify e.g. Python’s argparse library, and enable this functionality en masse for every python program that uses it. Have getopt-like libraries handle it transparently so that programs don’t even have to be modified.

Somebody get on that.