Great, thanks a lot, I'll go ahead and merge it.

It's a bit unfortunate that it only supports the optional argument at the end, cause people can't $ alias ding-bg="ding --no-timer", but in light of the discussion in #8, I think I should add some sorts of parse_optional_args() function when I implement the issue there anyway.

Agreed on more flexibility in the ordering.

I think that at some point it'll make sense to add something like argparse (I'm actually quite partial to click, but that would introduce a dependency) to deal with more complex options.

For what it's worth, my bashrc contains:
function ding() { /path/to/ding.py $@ --no-timer&}

so I can still call it as ding in 3s

Yeah, I'll probably end up using argparse, though I don't think it allows shared arguments among subparsers both at the beginning and at the end of the command unfortunately.

If it's a choice between $ ding --no-timer in 1s and $ ding in 1s --no-timer, which one do you think would be better? I see the former one as more friendly to alias, but the latter one a bit more natural as it feels like one would first think about the time, and only after about the options they may prefer.

I will do this tomorrow among with adding support for #8.