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1. tleonhardt

   added

   question

   on Jun 10, 2026
2. KelvinChung2000 commented on Jun 10, 2026

   

   KelvinChung2000

   on Jun 10, 2026

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   My current thinking is to keep supporting it and align it with argparse. However, I also think we should ban it, since this is never the intended use case for argparse. What is your thought @tleonhardt ?
3. tleonhardt commented on Jun 10, 2026

   

   tleonhardt

   on Jun 10, 2026

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   I'd say as long as we have a way of supporting a mutually exclusive group I think that is fine. I don't see the need to support a mutually exclusive group inside a normal argument group. But perhaps I am missing something?
4. neoniobium commented on Jun 10, 2026

   

   neoniobium

   on Jun 10, 2026

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   I think this is the intended way to use a mutually exclusive group. This example is taken directly from the argparse documentation.

   parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='PROG')
   group = parser.add_argument_group('Group title', 'Group description')
   exclusive_group = group.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True)
   exclusive_group.add_argument('--foo', help='foo help')
   exclusive_group.add_argument('--bar', help='bar help')
   parser.print_help()
5. KelvinChung2000 commented on Jun 10, 2026

   

   KelvinChung2000

   on Jun 10, 2026

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   For your specific example, you can do it in the following way

   from typing import Annotated
   
   import cmd2
   from cmd2.annotated import Group, Option, with_annotated
   
   
   class App(cmd2.Cmd):
     @with_annotated(
         mutually_exclusive_groups=(Group("foo", "bar", required=True, title="Group title", description="Group description"),),
     )
     def do_prog(
         self,
         foo: Annotated[str | None, Option(help_text="foo help")] = None,
         bar: Annotated[str | None, Option(help_text="bar help")] = None,
     ) -> None:
         self.poutput(f"foo={foo} bar={bar}")
   
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
     App().cmdloop()

   
6. KelvinChung2000 commented on Jun 10, 2026

   

   KelvinChung2000

   on Jun 10, 2026

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   I just noticed the title and description are not propagating to the help correctly. I will have this fixed.

   👍React with 👍2Reacted by Todd Leonhardt and neoniobium
7. neoniobium commented on Jun 11, 2026

   

   neoniobium

   on Jun 11, 2026

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   To my understanding, argparse is intended to support any number of arguments and/or mutually exclusive groups within an argument group. This makes sense to me: normal argument groups label arguments, while mutually exclusive groups change the behavior of the parser.
8. tleonhardt

   closed this as completedin #1693on Jun 14, 2026