You might also consider making it a consistently downloaded dependency if you plan to use any of it's advanced feature set, by dropping the `$(MAKECMDGOALS)` check.
In addition to a generic help output you can expose some configuration settings with `make vars`.
To do so define the variables you'd like to print with `PRINT_VARS := VAR1 VAR2 VAR3`.
In addition to the `help` and `vars` recipes you can use a custom make function to format your text for fancier output.
For this there are two options depending on your needs `tprint` or `tprint-sh`. (`tprint-sh` is for use within a multiline sub-shell that has already been silenced, see the version-check rule of this project's `Makefile` for an example.)
To use `tprint` you call it with the builtin `make` call function.
It accepts only one argument: an unquoted f-string literal.
All strings passed to `tprint` have access to an object `ansi` or `a` for simplicity.
This stores ANSI escape codes which can be used to style your text.
```make
## build | compile the source
.PHONY: build
build:
$(call tprint,{a.cyan}Build Starting{a.end})
...
$(call tprint,{a.green}Build Finished{a.end})
```
See this projects `make info` for more examples of `tprint`.
To see the available colors and formatting(bold,italic,etc.) use the hidden recipe `make _print-ansi`.
**Note**: Any help commands starting with an underscore will be ignored.
To view hidden `tasks` (or recipes in GNU Make land) you can use `make _help`.
In addition, you can use custom colors using the builtin `ansi.custom` or (`a.custom`) method.
It has two optional arguments `fg` and `bg`. Which can be used to specify either an 8-bit color from the [256 colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_color).
Or a tuple/list to define an RBG 24-bit color, for instance `a.custom(fg=(5,10,255))`.
For what it's worth there is also a predefined function for `bash` (named `tbash`) as well should you need to accomplish something similar of more easily embedding your bash script rather than having to escape every line with a backslash.
Just is a great task runner, but it suffers two problems, users probably don't have it installed already, and there is no way to define file specific recipes.
Most of my `Makefile`'s are comprised primarily of handy `.PHONY` recipes, but I always end up with a few file specific recipes.
Another interesting project I've evaluated for these purposes is [`go-task/task`](https://github.com/go-task/task).
`Task` has many of the features of `GNU Make` and some novel features of it's own.
But like `just` it's a tool people don't usually already have and it's configured using a `yaml` file.
