tldr-pages/tldr

tldr-pages is a community-maintained collection of simplified, practical help pages for command-line tools, designed as a friendlier complement to traditional man pages. The problem it solves is that the standard manual pages for Unix and Linux commands are often long, dense, and focus on edge cases and obscure options rather than the common everyday usage patterns most users actually need. Someone who just wants to know how to extract a tar archive or list files by modification date has to wade through pages of documentation to find what they need. Each tldr page focuses on the most common use cases for a command, showing practical examples with brief explanations. Rather than documenting every possible flag, a tldr page might show five or six representative examples that cover 90 percent of what people actually do with the command. The pages are written in a simple Markdown format and the entire collection is maintained collaboratively on GitHub, covering commands for Linux, macOS, Windows, BSD, Android, and other systems. To use it you install a client, available in Python, Rust, Node.js, and other languages, and then type tldr followed by a command name instead of man. You can also browse the pages in a web interface without installing anything. The pages are available in many translated languages. You would reach for tldr when you half-remember a command and want the two or three most common usage patterns immediately, without reading a full manual. The repository itself is primarily Markdown files, with clients implemented in various languages available separately.