CLI Reference

xquad is the command-line driver for the XQuad toolchain. It ships with the xquad Python package, so the install that gives you the Python API also puts the command on your PATH.

Installation

Install XQuad into a project environment first: a virtual environment, or a uv project.

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install xquad
# or, in a uv project:
uv add xquad

For the xquad command alone, outside any project, install it as a uv tool, with the quip extra for the xquad quip commands:

uv tool install xquad            # the xquad command
uv tool install 'xquad[quip]'    # with the xquad quip commands

On macOS, a user install (pip install --user, or pip falling back to one) puts the xquad command in ~/Library/Python/3.x/bin, which is not on PATH; python -m xquad runs the same command without it.

More generally, if your shell reports xquad: command not found, the script directory of that Python environment is not on PATH, and python -m xquad --help works in its place.

From a checkout of this repository, make xquad syncs the workspace virtual environment, and uv run xquad runs the command from it.

The command used to be a Rust binary from the xqcli crate, installed with cargo install. That crate is retired. If you installed it, run cargo uninstall xqcli, or the old binary in ~/.cargo/bin may shadow the new command on PATH.

Commands

xquad groups its commands by what they work on:

xquad --help
xquad <GROUP> --help
xquad --version