I'm going to try to merge several closely related issues here. Basically, people would like better control over the usage message formatting so that you could:

* Put program name and version information at the top of the message
* Customize the "usage:" string (e.g. capitalize it)

One proposal from anatoly techtonik would be to allow a format string so that you could write something like

"""My Program, version 3.5
Usage: %(usage)s

Some description of my program

%(argument_groups)%

My epliog text
"""

This should be implemented as a HelpFormatter class, but we might have to expose a little more of the HelpFormatter API (which is currently documented as a no-public API) to make this possible.

Patches welcome. ;-)