I cant believe i only learned about tldr two weeks ago…
It’s been a total gamechanger for me. I have such shitty memory for options flags. I’m pretty comfortable with the terminal and i’ve been full time linux for 15 years now
But i STILL cant remember common options for basic stuff like tar and curl…
curl output to file… -O or -o??? Have to look it up every time
Sometimes v is verbose and sometimes it’s version MAKE UP YOUR MIND
and then V is version to differentiate it from v for verbose but then sometimes V is equivalent to five vs for some reason,Relevant xkcd
tar --helpis a valid command :p
And yet it’s not the first time I’ve tried --help --verbose
“Full documentation available at httрs://blahblah”
“join our discord”
That’s usually the point at which I remove every software by those devs from my machines…
using Discord as a wanna be wiki/forum or Matrix chatroom replacement speaks volumes imo
luckily not many free/libre projects tread down that path. It’s more of an open source thing (since they don’t rly care about the 4 freedoms anyway)
Usually I hate this, I’m using man for a reason, but sometimes I’m scrolling through a novel-length man page thinking that maybe most of this information needs to be anywhere else.
grep -C5 -i TheShitINeedAlso
curl cheat.sh/[thing]It uses multiple sources including TLDR.basically
You can submit a pull request to improve the readme
But I’m reading the readme for how to do a pull request
There are plenty of guides on how to do a PR online
I think I’ve found myself wishing manpages were more detailed far more often than I’ve found myself wishing they were shorter. In any case a man page or help text should put the most important info/FAQs at the top.
I don’t understand why people think this is such a useful thing. Sure it has some good summaries but you can’t find all info there whereas man pages should have everything. It’s also good that tldr has examples but I think it’s something man should more often have too. So why would people rather use this than man?
For example I often forget the order of pattern and file in grep. I can look it up easily in both man and tldr. I also forget what was the short option for recursion. Was it -r, -R or either or something else entirely? I can easily do a search on my pager to find the option in man but there’s only long option available in tldr. That’s Too Long Don’t Want to Type.
I had this happen when I went to use the program ‘plink’. The wall of text was so massive I had to get the line count.
Over 1400 lines of help text.
At that point just show the source code and let the user figure it out
