You're Writing Paper Commands Wrong

You've probably written a CommandExecutor before. Everyone who's touched Bukkit has. Declare the command in plugin.yml , implement onCommand , cast args[0] to whatever you need, hope nobody fat-fingers the input. It compiles. It runs. It's confusing to debug. And it's the wrong way to do it in 2026. # plugin.yml commands : punish : description : Opens the punishment GUI usage : /punish <player> public class PunishCommand implements CommandExecutor { @Override public boolean onCommand ( CommandSender sender , Command command , String label , String [] args ) { if (!( sender instanceof Player staff )) return true ; if ( args . length < 1 ) return true ; Player target = Bukkit . getPlayer ( args [ 0 ]); if ( target == null ) { sender . sendMessage ( "Player not found." ); return true ; } // ... open the GUI return true ; } } Tie it together in onEnable() with getCommand("punish").setExecutor(new PunishCommand()) , add a separate TabCompleter implementation to handle suggestions, and you're done. Seems perfectly fine... totally not confusing at all... (if you understood any of that, you're doing better than I am :P) This implementation has many issues... like Bukkit.getPlayer(args[0]) only matching an exact, currently-online name. No selectors. No partial matching. You write all of that yourself or not at all. Tab completion lives in a second method you keep in sync with parsing by hand. Change one, forget the other, and tab completion starts "lying" to your players (a problem that has taken me HOURS to solve in the past... i'm getting flashbacks ;-;). And the tree itself is static, fixed in plugin.yml . Want /report to take a severity argument only when severities are configured? You can't say that in plugin.yml and you end up with a tangled mess that is almost never clean (either to you, or the players). Paper ships Mojang's Brigadier (the same framework vanilla Minecraft uses for everything) through a lifecycle hook: LifecycleEvents.COMMANDS . You register a tree of