[Req] A way to perform a full enumeration / debug dump

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

So, at the moment, BD provides some excellent debugging information that's hard to obtain any other way. However, getting at that information, especially when 'which information is going to help diagnose the issue' is a horrible pain in the ass.

At the moment, I'm using my own scripting to enumerate the betterdisplaycli help output, parse out supported keys (I'm not kidding lol), then serially invoke it over and over, requesting the value of those keys. It's extremely slow.

I was about to patch betterdisplaycli with a --all (repeat given command for every attached display), --dump (repeat *all commands for given display), and --dump --all flags; but I realized that while this helps me avoid shell-invocation round-trips and stays Swift-native, it's still unoptimized for the absolute ocean of details that any given display doesn't have.

BetterDisplay itself is the only thing that has a (fast) methodology of actually knowing which properties it can meaningfully extract for a given connected display.

So,

1. would you be willing to implement full detailed dump/enumeration in BD itself (currently impossible afaict), or if not,
2. would you accept a small PR to at least have bdcli mechanize BD? (=

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

As a slight aside, incase this turns up as a Google result for someone dealing with the same stuff I am - for supplementary tools, you might want to take a look at:

• @joevt's AllRez, dumps an absolute ocean of debugging information
  • AGDCDiagnose: built-in to macOS (locate AGDCDiagnose) if you're on an Intel Mac - included in AllRez's output if you install it
  • ioreg dumps; similarly-redundant if you use AllRez to dump: ioreg -l -w 0 -r -c IODisplayConnect and -c AppleDisplay
• displayplacer list, which is a fantastic overview of the connected monitors
• and the same usual basics from system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType

Also, if it's helpful, a script to invoke all of the above in a (vague-attempt-at-a) stable way: https://github.com/ELLIOTTCABLE/System/blob/main/Dotfiles/bin/display-diag-dump

[waydabber]

Indeed something like this would be useful. Iterating through all commands that have a get option working and output the result if it is not Failed or something should work. One could create a simple tool directly in Swift to do so by retrieving help, iterating through the relevant commands and providing an output. Maybe this could be aided by BetterDisplay providing a better command listing feature for this so one does not need to try to extract the commands from the help text.