Improve CLI experience for new projects

[andrebaltieri]

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Today we have a lot of templates and if you're starting on .NET is difficult to choose between them. Is also difficult to see what templates I can use... need to Google that.

If you're using Visual Studio, everything is more clear, the templates are organized and we have a GUI for that. But I think we have a lot of developers working through CLI, using VS Code.

The idea here is to have a global .NET command that show some selectable options on terminal, as Angular does when you start a new App.

For example dotnet new will show some questions to help me on creating my app.

dotnet new
  - Web application (ASP.NET/Blazor)
  - Mobile Application (MAUI)
  - Console Application
  ...

We can have more options after selecting the first one, and goes on. You got the idea.

Please, let me know if this make sense.

[dotnet-issue-labeler[bot]]

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[andrebaltieri]

Closing here since I think dotnet/cli is the right place for this issue!

[andrebaltieri]

Reopening since dotnet/cli was moved to here :) sry!

[vlada-shubina]

@KathleenDollard could you please check it? should it be part of the parser (to some extend)?

[baronfel]

We've talked a bit about having a more guided CLI experience for when we can detect an 'interactive' session. That would essentially prompt the user for input for arguments/options that are required to create the template. I think dotnet new would be the perfect entrypoint for this kind of experience - if no template is specified and we're in an interactive context (i.e. is a TTY and stdin isn't redirected, etc), then we should be able to have a much more interactive experience.

We could really go wild here - there are node.js/rich/Spectre.Console-style prompts for choices, multi-selects, etc. But you quickly get into spaces where you want a higher-level abstraction over the raw input/output. We might need to coordinate with System.CommandLine for this.

[sayedihashimi]

Love it! I’ve wanted this since we first started this project.

[vlada-shubina]

In case we get some support from System.CommandLine, it would be definitely a good feature to do. However, implementing interactive mode just for dotnet new might be unreasonably much effort. Also, it makes sense to enable it SDK-wide, not only for dotnet new.

[vlada-shubina]

Feature request for interactive mode in System.CommandLine: https://github.com/dotnet/command-line-api/issues/1319

[vlada-shubina]

We merged this issue with https://github.com/dotnet/templating/issues/6024. Please follow up there, sorry for inconvenience.