TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

Post by avodonosov » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

diebeforei485 wrote: post #80

ddevault wrote: post #27

A heartfelt plea: The man pages are community driven, too. If you think they can be improved, instead of investing in rapidly decaying third-party documentation, please take your improvements upstream. The maintainers would be thrilled to have them.

No, they serve two different purposes. Man pages are a reference/spec on all options and parameters, aimed at those who already have use a tool/technology/concept. This is something different. It's a tutorial of how to do the most common things using that tool. It's a bit like learning a programming language: would you read the formal spec, or would you learn from code examples? Unless you've read formal specs for ot…

Post by Brave-Steak » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

b5n wrote: post #110

Brave-Steak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I type ‘tldr’ and don’t waste my time? I swear to god, engineers are so focused on efficiency and yet are so eager to waste so much time and effort on repeating crap like this unnecessarily. Just think about the context switches alone necessary to type all that.

It was easy for me, no context switching. I assume basic use of grep and awk shouldn't be too much of a stretch for most Linux savvy engineers. I'm happy TLDR fits your needs. I was just demonstrating how I use manpages effectively in hopes it might assist you.

Post by teddyh » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #101

ddevault wrote: post #27

A heartfelt plea: The man pages are community driven, too. If you think they can be improved, instead of investing in rapidly decaying third-party documentation, please take your improvements upstream. The maintainers would be thrilled to have them.

It would be interesting to take a step back and consider what man pages actually are. Are they documentation structured in a specific way, dating back to Unix origins, or are they what the user sees if they type "man command" on the command line? Because if we consider the latter, I think it will be much easier to see radical improvement of the "man experience" If I type "man ps" I see Man: find all matching manual p…

Post by JdeBP » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

topspin wrote: post #76

ddevault wrote: post #27

A heartfelt plea: The man pages are community driven, too. If you think they can be improved, instead of investing in rapidly decaying third-party documentation, please take your improvements upstream. The maintainers would be thrilled to have them.

> The maintainers would be thrilled to have them. Would they? The tldr.sh site prominently offers a sample of usage examples for a command; tar specifically. If one checks the tar man page there are no examples. This is policy, apparently promulgated by GNU et al. in favor of "info". I haven't the time right now to hunt down the official position, but here[1] is a SO discussion. Should this TLDR thing correct that lo…

Post by dbrgn » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

josephernest wrote: post #62

1) Great project! Is there a simple way to install it without having to install Node.js or Haskell or Ruby? (I don't want to install Node.js just for it) Is there a apt-get install tldr solution on recent Debian / Ubuntu distros without installing another additional package manager ? I mean even the bash solution: bpkg ... does not work out of the box. (bpkg or brew or npm aren't installed by default) 2) Is TLDR link…