📣 Removing immersive mode in Office 365 CLI v3

[waldekmastykarz]

In v3 of the Office 365 CLI, we will remove the immersive mode. Starting from v3 planned for the fall of 2020 you will be able to use the CLI only in the non-immersive mode.

You can work with Office 365 CLI in two modes: immersive and non-immersive. In the immersive mode, you start it as a command-line application by typing o365. Office 365 CLI presents you with its own command prompt and from that point on you can execute only Office 365 CLI commands. In the non-immersive mode you execute a specific command directly from the shell, like o365 spo site list.

Office 365 CLI offers its immersive mode thanks to Vorpal - the base package upon which Office 365 CLI is built. Unfortunately, over time Vorpal got less and less maintained and its efforts to introduce a new major version have stalled. To avoid shipping the CLI with outdated dependencies that are no longer maintained, we're considering removing Vorpal altogether in the future and either moving to another package or building the necessary functionality ourselves. Because we're not sure which option we'll end up with, we decided to use v3 and introduce the breaking change of removing the immersive mode. While v3 could still be running on Vorpal, the immersive mode will be no longer available. If you try to run Office 365 CLI without specifying a command, the CLI will show you help listing its commands.

Our goal is to keep Office 365 CLI secure and reliable and use as few dependencies as possible to deliver the necessary functionality. With each release we assess its dependencies and update them regularly to ensure we benefit of the latest improvements and fixes in the packages we use in the CLI. While we'd prefer to invest our time in adding more functionality, we want to ensure that you will be able to use Office 365 CLI in the future versions of Node.js without any problems.