AWK Makefile help message,

Makefile

.DEFAULT_GOAL := help
.PHONY: help

help: ## This help message
	@awk -F '[, ]+' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+:.*##/ { \
		target = $$0; \
		sub(/^[ \t]*/, "", target); \
		sub(/:.*##/, "##", target); \
		split(target, parts, "##"); \
		gsub(/^[ \t]*|[ \t]*$$/, "", parts[1]); \
		gsub(/^[ \t]*|[ \t]*$$/, "", parts[2]); \
		printf "%-30s %s\n", parts[1], parts[2]; \
	}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

create-venv: ## Create python virtual environment at .venv
	python3.12 -m venv .venv

This is adopted from this article: https://diamantidis.github.io/tips/2020/07/01/list-makefile-targets
I thought this could probably be solved with my favorite language, AWK, so I did.

Here's another implementation (by claude-sonnet-3.7-thinking)

help: ## Display this help message
	@echo "Usage:"
	@grep -E '^[a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?## .*$$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | grep -v "\.PHONY" | sort | awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "}; {printf "  \033[36m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2}'

Furthermore, I asked it which was better:

My target is generally better because:

• It's more standard and widely used in Makefiles
• It has colored output which improves readability
• It has a cleaner implementation with less complex string manipulation
• It includes a helpful "Usage:" header

The only advantage Hermano's approach might have is supporting numeric characters in target names, but this is rarely needed and the standard help implementation covers most use cases more elegantly.