Robert D. French

Make Help Patterns in the Wild

I am a big fan of running make help to see a list of useful tasks in a repo. Maybe it exposes build options, various tests (when I don't want to run the full suite), or scaffolding options for generating new code.

I thought I was alone in this, but I've recently seen it crop up in a Reddit Post by Dave Kerr, author of the (forthcoming) "Effective Shell" book from no starch press.

Dave's approach is a bit more involved, but offers nice color highlighting. Mine is a bit planer, and relies on spacing to differentiate commands from comments. Take a look: https://github.com/robertdfrench/ifuncd-up/blob/trunk/Makefile#L5