tldr-man is a command-line client for tldr-pages, a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools. It differs from other clients because it displays its pages as man pages.

This client is also able to integrate with the man command to fall back to displaying a tldr-page for a command when no manpage exists.

Features:

• Fully abides by the tldr-pages client specification.
• Supports all page languages, not just English pages.
• Displays tldr-pages in the same style as manpages.
• Integrates with man to provide a fallback for missing manpages.
• Supports rendering markdown formatted tldr-pages with --render.
• Local cache abides by the XDG base directory specification.
• Supports shell completion for bash, zsh, and fish shells.
• And much more!

Installation

With Homebrew

Install tldr-man with Homebrew:

brew install superatomic/tap/tldr-man

With Pip

Install tldr-man with pip (version 3.10+):

pip install tldr-man

tldr-man additionally depends on pandoc being installed.

After installation, you can view a tldr-page with the tldr command.

Usage

Display a tldr-page for a command:

tldr <COMMAND>

Update the local page cache:

tldr --update

Render a page locally:

tldr --render path/to/page.md

Print tldr manpage paths as a colon-separated list (see the Manpage Integration section):

tldr --manpath

Display usage information:

tldr --help

Setting languages

As specified by the tldr-pages client specification, tldr-pages from other languages can be displayed by this client (falling back to English if the page doesn't exist for that language).

To do so, set any of the environment variables $LANG, $LANGUAGE, or $TLDR_LANGUAGE to the two-letter language code for your language (e.g. export LANGUAGE=es), or set the --language option when running tldr (e.g. tldr <COMMAND> --language es).

Setting platforms

By default, tldr-pages will be displayed based on your current platform. To directly specify what platform's page to use, use the --platform flag.

For example, to display the macOS version of the top command's tldr-page, run tldr top --platform macos. This is the default behavior on macOS, but --platform macos is required to show the macOS version of this page on other platforms.

Manpage Integration

The command man can be set up to fall back to displaying tldr-pages if no manpages are found.

To do so, add the provided line to your shell's startup script (e.g. ~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshenv, ~/.config/fish/config.fish) to add this behavior to man:

Bash and Zsh

export MANPATH="$MANPATH:$(tldr --manpath)"

Fish

set -gxa MANPATH (tldr --manpath)