@Julien: I haven't looked into boost::program_options yet, though I don't see a problem in integrating the current design in anything as it's merely a class that reads from a std::basic_istream and writes to a std::basic_ostream whilst calling registered callbacks based on the input… The parameters are currently instances of std::basic_string which are passed to the callback which can than operate on these parameters. On the list of commands thing: I thought about that for a while now and would say that something like Lua would be a perfect solution to be combined with the current design to allow that flexible scripting… @Artyom: I've never before heard about GNU Readline; does that mean that consoles like bash don't offer such a functionality to programs automatically (something that even cmd.exe does)? "Help" is meant to be a short help text on the command, similar to a man-page…