Quite often the names of subcommands are quite long so that their meaning is clear.  However, the downside to this is the increased typing the user of the command must make.  A compromise between clarity and brevity can be realized if abbreviation of subcommands is allowed with the proviso that the abbreviation must be long enough to remove any ambiguity.

So that this feature is not foisted on every programmer that uses argparse it could be made an option to the ArgumentParser class with the (possible) additional refinement of specifying a minimum number of characters for the abbreviations.