Likely they print that message for any unknown argument.

It's probably fuzzy similarity search

If you can bother writing a fuzzy similarity search, you can just short-circuit it on "--help". Most software I see with such problems do neither.

I think the idea is that fuzzy search makes it easier for users to spot typos and this is a general feature of the flag library not something specific for --help.

Short-circuit any typo may be dangerous.

Now, an argument can be made for including as many aliases for "help" and "version" as possible but that's a different story

You can of course - I think the point here is it's different people with different goals writing the CLI lib vs the application.

So it's often not the case that a single person who made the decision to have a message that says "you asked for help, but you did it wrong; before I give you help you have to ask correctly."

"this dependency I picked at random from CPAN doesn't support that" is a pretty weak excuse for shipping a poor user experience

I don’t think people bother to write them, more likely it’s built in to whatever cli lib they happen to be using and they enable it.

sorry, you've typed "[em][en]h[Cyrillic]lp", try again

It's "helping" in an incredibly pedantic and unhelpful way. The developer has opted to add explicit support for the common option, but only as a means to tell the user that they are "holding it wrong" (in the immortal words of Apple)

When I was a kid, I was playing Beyond Zork, and one night when I was very tired I came across a pterodactyl. Unfortunately, I kept making typos.

>> aim wand at perodactyl

> I see no perodactyl here.

>> aim wand at pterodacyl

> I see no pterodacyl here.

Frustrated at my continuing mistakes, I decided to try to short-circuit their logic. Despite knowing the difference, I typed this:

> aim wand at bird

And the game replied:

> a pterodactyl is not a bird

Haha. “The developers thought of everything” (not really though)

I LOLed at that, thank you. Infocom games were amazing.