"Display help text when passed no options" only if no options are necessary

[l0b0]

A lot of commands don't need any options to do useful things, and in those cases they should not print a lot of distracting text. Imagine if ls or ln foo bar printed their help text, that would be terrible.

(If by "option" you meant to say "argument", then that should be clarified, but the same point still holds for ls.)

(I realise this is explained later on, but since all the headings are the same size it's not obvious that the heading comes with some important caveats. Maybe a heading like "Display help when the command would otherwise do nothing" or something to that effect might work?)

[eqn-group]

This is bad, how would some user who has never used cd ls whoami etc would know what these program does?
my argument is here: #121 (comment)

[l0b0]

This is bad, how would some user who has never used cd ls whoami etc would know what these program does? my argument is here: #121 (comment)

By running COMMAND --help. I think this argument throws out the baby with the bathwater.