Man pages are complete and authoritative. They are also, frequently, not what I need when I need them. I know tar exists. I do not remember whether it's -xzf or -xvzf or what order the flags go in. The man page will tell me this after I've read three paragraphs of context I already know.
tldr is a community-maintained collection of simplified, example-driven pages for common commands. The examples are the documentation.
brew install tlrc
# tlrc is the Rust client, fast and offline-capable
tldr tar
# outputs: 4-6 common use cases with flags explained inline
# alias for convenience
alias t='tldr'I still use man pages for edge cases and when I need to understand behavior fully. But tldr is the first stop for "I know what I want to do, I just can't remember the flags." That covers maybe 70% of my manual lookups.
The tlrc client caches pages locally, so it works offline. The pages are updated regularly by the community. Coverage is good for common Unix tools and growing for newer ones.