The npm init <create-pkg-name> command will

• detect the argument after npm init
• append the appropriate prefix to it
  (e.g. npm init esm will translate the esm arg to create-esm)
• invoke the equiv of npx create-esm via libnpx

Related to zkat/npx#167.

Update:

Okay!

Basic functionality exists in the PR now (thanks to @zkat for getting me unstuck).

At the moment I defer to npx for parsing args and handling installs, which means it follows its rules on fresh installing packages and all that. npx does all the heavy lifting here so this tie-in is pretty minimal.

I based npx invocation on bin/npx-cli.js. The first arg beyond npm init __ is used as the initer to resolve. Additional arguments are forwarded to the initer.

I used args passed to init() as the initial feature gate because it was provided info. The args array lacks extra flags though. So, for say npm init esm -y the args array to init() is ['esm']. This is why process.argv is used to forward additional args.

Erroring is handled by npx. So for invalid packages the result looks like

npm init b -y
npm ERR! code E404
npm ERR! 404 Not Found: create-b@latest

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/jdalton/.npm/_logs/2018-04-11T23_57_32_908Z-debug.log
Install for create-b@latest failed with code 1

Update:

Added create as an alias of init and added innit as an affordance of init.