Change Request: file glob for eslint --init is hard to figure out

ESLint version

7.32.0

What problem do you want to solve?

When using eslint --init on is asked Which file(s), path(s), or glob(s) should be examined?. A lot of intuitive inputs like src/**/*.(ts|tsx), src/**/*.ts and *ts all don’t work for a project with .ts and .tsx files in src/ under the project root where yarn run eslint --init is executed. It’s a frustrating first contact with eslint, especially since one has to start over with the questionaire and there’s no link to documentation in the output and no --help for --init. The only thing I could find rtfm-wise is the issue linked below which didn’t help me.

The specific error message is

No files matching the pattern "src/**/*.(ts|tsx)" were found.
Please check for typing mistakes in the pattern.

What do you think is the correct solution?

A link to the documentation in the output is slightly hard to maintain but would make a very good first impression of eslint.

It seems like --init could be a subcommand as well, i.e. eslint --init would become eslint init so that it could provide a --help. I don’t like eslint --init --help because it’s no a nice cli.

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this change.

Additional comments

There’s another misunderstanding of the question at https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/7211 which has been handled as support request and been closed without improvement because it hasn’t been requested by the reporter.

[nzakas]

Yeah, the auto config is a bit broken. I actually thought we had removed it but apparently not. In any event, I’m not surprised it doesn’t work properly with TypeScript files as that requires a custom parser and the built in rules don’t always work correctly with TypeScript.

I think we will probably move forward with removing this feature rather than trying to fix it.

[mdjermanovic]

Per https://github.com/eslint/rfcs/pull/79, the auto-config feature will be removed in one of the future minor versions, and that’s likely to be very soon (https://github.com/eslint/eslint/pull/15150), so I’m closing this issue since it only relates to auto-config.