"They can be concatenated" needs an additional newline.

This whole color stuff can now be just dropped.

1. For consistency, should we follow --before_context=<num> and --after_context=<num> as established by wp db search ? I rather like --log_context=<> better, but I think we should opt for consistency whenever possible.
2. We should wrap the argument description at whatever count we use for the others.

we should opt for consistency

Am going to propose adding the same "shortcut" version --context to wp db search (also a shortcut ---colors). This would make them more or less consistent (barring the log_ prefix), with db search having a superset.

(The main motivation for not just using log_context_before etc was as you mention below the large amount of options that search-replace already has.)

The log_ prefix seemed needed to give clarity to and group the options and is sort of consistent with db search (which doesn't have a log option) but I'll drop if you think it's confusing/inconsistent.

Edit okay given the other log options are being dropped, I'll drop --log_context and just do --context_before and --context_after.

wrap the argument description

Will do.

(Probably the same/similar newline stripping as is now done for the handbook should be done for help in general, as the some-do, some-don't wrapping currently on help looks odd.)

Is this necessary as a command argument, or could it be an environment variable instead?

The command arguments available to wp search-replace have become a bit overwhelming. We may need to more actively address this in the future.

It's easily changed to be an environment variable instead, so will do.

The command arguments available to wp search-replace have become a bit overwhelming.

Yes, the synopsis isn't easy to parse, especially with all those square brackets. Was thinking some auto-embolding (similar to most Unix man pages) would help but not sure:

wp search-replace <old> <new> [<table>...] [--dry-run] [--network] [--all-tables-with-prefix] [--all-tables] [--export[=]] [--export_insert_size=] [--skip-columns=]
[--include-columns=] [--precise] [--recurse-objects] [--verbose] [--regex] [--regex-flags=] [--regex-delimiter=] [--format=] [--report]
[--report-changed-only] [--log[=]] [--log_context=<before_num,after_num>] [--log_prefixes=<old_prefix,new_prefix>] [--log_colors=<table_column_id_color,old_color,new_color>]

and similarly for the line-by-line options. I actually prototyped something like this a long time ago (when doing the word-wrapping) so will dig it up if you think it's worthwhile.

Same comment as above: does this need to be a command argument?

I think my preference would be to remove this as an option entirely. We can bring it up again in the future if anyone brings it up.

Okay, will do.