I’ve thought about this a few times, but I’m concerned about creating even more ways to do the same things. If we were starting from scratch today we’d use this approach, but we have almost 25 years of inertia behind the current command-line conventions.
the old
cmake <path>command may be marked as deprecated and will be used if<path>exists
The meaning of cmake <path> is entrenched, so IMO the namespace for cmake subcommands is not available. We’d need a new top-level cm <subcommand> entry point. Mapping of new entry points to existing functionality, such as cm build to cmake --build would need to be carefully designed on a case-by-case basis.
One of the most common ways to invoke cmake is to just configure/generate a new build tree or regenerate an existing one. What cm <subcommand> signature(s) might you propose for that? They’d need to be no harder to type than cmake -B build or cmake --preset xyz.