TL;DR

I discovered tldr and siblings.

Like a politician would say, different manpages are possible!

I recently discovered tldr and the tldr-pages project:

The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.

I like how it eats its own dog food:

$ tldr tldr

  Displays simple help pages for command-line tools, from the
  tldr-pages project.
  More information: <https://tldr.sh>.

  ✓ Get typical usages of a command (hint: this is how you got here!):

    🍣  tldr 

  ✓ Show the tar tldr page for Linux:

    🍣  tldr -p  

  ✓ Get help for a git subcommand:

    🍣  tldr 

  ✓ Update local pages (if the client supports caching):

    🍣  tldr -u

The output is actually more colorful than shown above, but even this example gives the gist of what this project is about: providing meaningful examples of typical usage for the command.

WAIT A MINUTE YOU SON OF AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY-SH BREACH!

This is the whole idea behind the venerable SYNOPSIS section in all decent Perl documentation! Time and again Perl proved to be a cornucopia of (practical) ideas worth stealing, good job! 🤩

If you’re interested, there is a Perl client, which is of course what I installed myself… so happy reading!