COMPLEMENT MAN PAGES

The man pages are home to all pertinent information about any given command, such as description of the command, syntax, list of switches/arguments, with explanation, some examples, author information, and more.

If you find the bulk of the information is irrelevant to your needs, there are other projects that will help you quickly get started with the specified command. We’ve already covered TLDR in this tutorial, but apart from that you can also try your hands at a couple of additional projects that make working with CLI a breeze.

The bropages project strives to ‘just get to the point’. Unlike man pages however, bropages only provides examples on how to use the specified command. As with TLDR, this is a community-driven project, with examples contributed by the users. You’ll have to install Ruby on your distribution, and then use the gem package manager to install bropages. Once installed, you can run bro for a list of user curated examples. You can also up/down vote the given examples, and even add your own to the list, all from the convenience of the terminal itself.

The cheat project similarly provides a cheatsheet for a large number of command-line tools and utilities. The Python project can be install using pip on most popular desktop distributions. Once installed, you can then run cheat to view the cheatsheet, which essentially comprises a large number of examples, for the specified command.