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TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

tldr.sh

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Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#141

Post by Polylactic_acid »

bauerd wrote: post #33
reaperducer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may contain all information, but a clear F on UX. What I find annoying is the number of command line programs that don't even have man pages anymore. Or maybe that's just an artifact of installing them with brew? What I find interesting is that for the most part (there are exceptions), the older the man page, the more useful it is. Realistic examples. Succinct descriptions. User-friendly terminology. Too many of t…

Some ecosystems even eschew manpages. For example, I wouldn't know how to ship manpages as part of a Ruby gem, it's discouraged iirc

For a ruby gem you would most likely use the --help flag. This has the advantage of working on sub commands so you can do `gemname command --help` and get more specific help.

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#142

Post by killjoywashere »

neckardt wrote: post #136
catalogia wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the nice qualities of man pages is comprehensiveness, while one of the nice qualities of tldr docs is succinctness. Both are mutually exclusive; man pages cannot be both. An examples section in a manpage is a fine idea which I would certainly encourage, but that wouldn't render tldr obsolete.

Ideally I would like to see an additional section in man pages devoted to examples. The TLDR pages could then be moved into the man pages.

tldr didn't choose tar as their front-page demo by accident. The tar manpage is a classic example of the CLI gods apparently going to some effort to design the Examples section to effectively tell new users to bugger the hell off.

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#143

Post by pauldino »

hyperpallium wrote: post #122
b3kart wrote: post #18

Shout out to http://cht.sh , which could be used without installing anything: curl cht.sh/tr

How can I remove the colors from the output? It's hard to read on mobile (termux).

Aside from things like ansifilter you can add a ?style=bw parameter to remove the colors, e.g.

    $ curl cht.sh/ls?style=bw
Or if you do like colors but not the defaults you can try other styles, see http://cht.sh/:styles

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#144

Post by Polylactic_acid »

stared wrote: post #13
fredley wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tldr has a better name.

Was BroPages name the only reason it hasn't gone mainstream?

No it never went mainstream because it a tool with worse ui and less content than a search engine + stack overflow.

I can find simple instructions for almost any tool with a search like "Convert flac to opus ffmpeg"

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#146

Post by ilammy »

wongarsu wrote: post #28
reaperducer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may contain all information, but a clear F on UX. What I find annoying is the number of command line programs that don't even have man pages anymore. Or maybe that's just an artifact of installing them with brew? What I find interesting is that for the most part (there are exceptions), the older the man page, the more useful it is. Realistic examples. Succinct descriptions. User-friendly terminology. Too many of t…

I don't think I've encountered anything on Ubuntu that doesn't have a man page, but it also seems like many of the man pages are created or improved by Debian or Ubuntu/Canonical. Homebrew probably wouldn't have those.

> I don't think I've encountered anything on Ubuntu that doesn't have a man page

Ubuntu pull most of its packages from Debian, and Debian Policy says that every package that provides binaries should provide manpages for them as well. It is not a hard requirement but their absence is considered a bug.

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#147

Post by dang »

Brave-Steak wrote: post #127
b5n wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And your comments are infuriatingly dismissive. Typical of a software engineer to not give a shit about accessibility, ease of use, actual efficiency, tools getting out of the way of people who want to do their actual jobs, etc. tl;dr You’re arrogant and elitist and think everybody should work like you do.

Whoa, personal attacks like this will get you banned here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of HN when posting here?

In addition to the guidelines, you might find these old links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#148

Post by voltagex_ »

killjoywashere wrote: post #142
neckardt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally I would like to see an additional section in man pages devoted to examples. The TLDR pages could then be moved into the man pages.

tldr didn't choose tar as their front-page demo by accident. The tar manpage is a classic example of the CLI gods apparently going to some effort to design the Examples section to effectively tell new users to bugger the hell off.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar&apropos=0&sekt...

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#149

Post by [deleted] »

voltagex_ wrote: post #148
killjoywashere wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tldr didn't choose tar as their front-page demo by accident. The tar manpage is a classic example of the CLI gods apparently going to some effort to design the Examples section to effectively tell new users to bugger the hell off.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar&apropos=0&sekt...

[deleted]

Re: TLDR pages: Simplified, community-driven man pages

#150

Post by Jaepa »

munk-a wrote: post #82
overcast wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the maintainers of man pages just refuse to bother with something so obvious. It's been decades, and man pages are still archaic and not user friendly.

I dunno, the TLDR page highlighted tar which seems a bit odd since tar has always gone out of its way to have a very strong and useful manpage - specifically having several examples[1] at the top of the page before diving into all the intricacies of the arguments. 1. Including tar -cf and tar -xf probably the two you want to run in most cases. See: https://linux.die.net/man/1/tar

I'd guess this is a xkcd reference.

https://www.xkcd.com/1168/

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