> This pattern is cumbersome to deal with in practice, especially in tools that use subcommands. Instead of typing foo bar -h to get help, you have to move the cursor between foo and bar to insert help: foo help bar in order to get help about the bar subcommand. Then, once you presumably know how to use it, up-arrow, remove help from between the tool and subcommand, move to the end of the line, and continue on.

This is not a pain if you are using the default readline keybindings (which ape those of Emacs): up arrow, M-b to move back one word, type 'help ', hit RET; for the next bit, up arrow, M-b M-b to move back two words (to the beginning of 'help'), M-d to delete forward one word, C-e to go to the end of the line and you're done. No doubt it's similarly easy using the vi keybindings.

That sounds complex, but really it's second nature.

> As in the case of podman above, if you know your user is asking for help, show them the damn help.

The issue there is that it doesn't know the user is asking for help, because the way one asks for help with podman is with --help; -h is meaningless to podman. Note that -h isn't always the flag for help; just off the top of my head, in several command-line tools it is the flag for human-readable file sizes.