You misunderstand me. It’s not about typing it. It’s not conforming to prevalent Linux paradigms which creates artificial confusion and learning difficulties. There’s a reason it’s git pull and not git -L, perf annotate and not perf -A . It’s a great semantic difference like <b> vs <h3>. I’m saying this as an Arch user.
Because it’s not an option but a subcommand.
as in standard option processing in GNU / Linux
Guix and standard tooling like perf also use subcommands. I’m used to flags/options modifying the way the same inputs are processed, not completely changing what you give as $1.
That’s good documentation, not good interface
Edit: For example you could’ve had pacman sync -h instead
My problem is that it’s a flag and not like # pacman remove
Personally I dislike pacman as it uses capital-letter flags as subcommands while I’m used to actual subcommands
The prevalent way (except for ancient tools like tar), and thus the norm, is that options are meant to be optional and subcommands are like old “do one thing” Unix commands (do completely different things, can have completely different set of arguments) but you prepend the name of the software in front of them. You can see the impact of this reflected in documentation for argument parsers: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/argparse.html#%3A~%3Atext=Required+options+are+generally+considered+bad+form+because+users+expect+options+to+be+optional https://gobyexample.com/command-line-subcommands#%3A~%3Atext=Command-Line+Subcommands-%2CGo+by+Example%3A+Command-Line+Subcommands%2Cthat+have+their+own+flags.