Suggest "Did you mean" for misspelled commands

[johnthagen]

Summary

It would be useful to end users of click CLI applications if when they misspelled CLI sub-commands they got a helpful Did you mean... error message in a similar way to when they misspell an @option name (e.g., --name).

Motivating Example

Consider the following example Click CLI app:

import click


@click.group()
def cli():
    pass


@cli.command()
@click.option("--name", "-n", default="World")
def greet(name: str) -> None:
    click.echo(f"Hello, {name}")


@cli.command()
@click.option("--name", "-n", default="Friend")
def farewell(name: str) -> None:
    click.echo(f"Goodbye, {name}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    cli()

If the user misspells --name, they get a helpful Did you mean error message:

$ ./main.py greet --nme David 
Usage: main.py greet [OPTIONS]
Try 'main.py greet --help' for help.

Error: No such option: --nme Did you mean --name?

But if they misspell greet, they do not:

$ ./main.py gret --name David
Usage: main.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Try 'main.py --help' for help.

Error: No such command 'gret'.

Test Environment

• Click 8.3.0
• Python 3.13.8

Related Work

• Use difflib for potential suggestions in cli error messages #1446
• use difflib for name suggestions in error messages #1455