I'm little bit surprised that you were able to unconfuse yourself without any additional help (respectfully of course) considering that you are a python programmer.
Sorry don't really understand your comment here honestly. I feel it's a jab back of sorts, since guessing you took offence to my previous comment(which 100% wasen't ment in such way, but in hindsight probably shouldn't have posted like that, sorry about that), which is fine, not thinned skinned ussually(Edit: Get it know, so tongue in check jab back, not that one ever was given precedingly, atleast not in intent, but whatever and admittedly not best wording in hindsight, and hinting at my under-superiority at being supposedly a python programmer - pretty sure got that right now, don't know why was so hard to deduct for me, so probably correct after all lol
) , and just wanted to explain my previous comment was about you using a '--confirm' switch and expecting it to not act as a '--confirm' switch, e.g. kinda like a '-y' switch of apt-get etc. I thought you where referring to the help text and hence made the post like that.
Hmm, on second thought, while writing this, also taking into consideration your later comments, then I see it could actually be understood as a switch for wanting to get displayed confirmation additionally, but nonetheless despite me thinking the word "confirm" much more likely rings bells of beeing same as a '-y' switch, then as said now better understand the argument e.g my used distro's package manager has a '--noconfirm' switch doing same as deluge-console's '--confirm' switch
And from an UI design perspective the --no-act argument makes more sense than an --act argument. If the default behavior is to list, then it is a list command instead of a remove command. Acting by default and accepting a --no-act argument would also be in line with just about every other CLI program ever made. If you want a reasonable and safe default behavior, then it should be to prompt a [y/n] confirmation with every matching torrent. And you could then bypass the prompt by issuing a --yes --batch or a --force.
I agree in most your points, would be nice to have it output (y/n) and a '-y' switch etc. Don't feel "no-act" makes more sence imho, neither sure that majority of CLI apps that accepts confirmation defaults to "act", but could be wrong. Interesting point about 'rm' by default is a list command, never thought about that, but true
So instead of fixing the help text, maybe fix behavior instead. I see that you have already acknowledged the unintuitiveness of the current behavior by making the rm command print out an instruction prompting the user to use the --confirm argument if one is omitted. Printing out the instruction is essentially saying "Gee, we know that there is a good chance that what just happened isn't what you were expecting to happen when you issued the command. So here is what you need to do to get it to do what you were expecting." And if you need to say that, then there might be something wrong with your UI design.
Personally I don't care enough to make PR for this - i'm not a deluge dev btw, just fellow forum member, and not good programmer neither