TLDR
Better man pages
A fondness of reading is a good habit to inculcate, but Shashank Sharma believes it requires more than spending quality time with man pages.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s had it with superhero movies and TV shows.
There’s very little you can achieve with CLIbased tools and utilities without referring to the manual pages. Commonly known as man pages, these serve as an introduction to all the myriad available options for the different commands, tools and utilities. But as useful as the man pages are, they can also overwhelm you with information. For instance, the man page for the curl command is over 3,000 lines long. The man page for pdftk similarly runs onto over 500 lines. By comparison, the pages for these commands in the TLDR utility clock in at fewer than 140 and 20 lines respectively.
The stark contrast in size will have already help explain the name of the project. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) is a popular internet slang, and is often used to provide a summary of long text. According its own description, TLDR is a community-driven effort which strives to simplify man pages into easily digestible pieces of information.