tealdeer

Crate	Linux	macOS

A very fast implementation of tldr in Rust: Simplified, example based and community-driven man pages.

If you pronounce "tldr" in English, it sounds somewhat like "tealdeer". Hence the project name :)

In case you're in a hurry and just want to quickly try tealdeer, you can find static binaries on the GitHub releases page!

Goals

High level project goals:

• Download and cache pages
• Don't require a network connection for anything besides updating the cache
• Command line interface similar or equivalent to the NodeJS client
• Be fast

A tool like tldr should be as frictionless as possible to use. It should be easy to invoke (just tldr tar, not using another subcommand like tldr find tar) and it should show the output as fast as possible.

tealdeer reaches these goals. During a (highly non-scientific) test (see #38 for details), I tested the invocation speed of tldr <command> for a few of the existing clients:

Client	Times (ms)	Avg of 5 (ms)
Tealdeer	15/11/5/5/11	9.4
C client	11/5/12/11/15	10.8
Bash client	15/19/22/25/24	21.0
Go client by k3mist	98/96/100/95/101	98.8
Python client	152/148/151/158/140	149.8
NodeJS client	169/171/170/170/170	170.0

tealdeer was the winner here, although the C client and the Bash client are in the same speed class. Interpreted languages are clearly much slower to invoke, a delay of 170 milliseconds is definitely noticeable and increases friction for the user.

These are the clients I tried but failed to compile or run: Haskell client, Ruby client, Perl client, Go client by anoopengineer, PHP client.

Usage

tldr [options] <command>
tldr [options]

Options:

    -h --help            Show this screen
    -v --version         Show version information
    -l --list            List all commands in the cache
    -f --render <file>   Render a specific markdown file
    -o --os <type>       Override the operating system [linux, osx, sunos]
    -u --update          Update the local cache
    -c --clear-cache     Clear the local cache
    -q --quiet           Suppress informational messages
    --config-path        Show config file path
    --seed-config        Create a basic config

Examples:

    $ tldr tar
    $ tldr --list

To control the cache:

    $ tldr --update
    $ tldr --clear-cache

To render a local file (for testing):

    $ tldr --render /path/to/file.md

Installing

Static Binaries (Linux)

Static binary builds (currently for Linux only) are available on the GitHub releases page. Simply download the binary for your platform and run it!

Builds for other platforms are planned.

Cargo Install (any platform)

Build and install the tool via cargo...

$ cargo install tealdeer

From Source (any platform)

tealdeer requires at least Rust 1.19.

Debug build with logging enabled:

$ cargo build --features logging

Release build without logging:

$ cargo build --release

To enable the log output, set the RUST_LOG env variable:

$ export RUST_LOG=tldr=debug

From AUR (Arch Linux)

If you're an Arch Linux user, you can also install the package from the AUR:

• tealdeer
• tealdeer-git

From Homebrew (macOS)

If you're a macOS user, you can install the package from the Homebrew with the following command:

$ brew install tealdeer

Configuration

The tldr command can be customized with a config file called config.toml. Creating the config file can be done manually or with the help of tldr:

$ tldr --seed-config

The configuration file path follows OS conventions. It can be queried with the following command:

$ tldr --config-path

Style

Using the config file, the style (e.g. colors or underlines) can be customized.

Possible styles:

• description: The initial description text
• command_name: The command name as part of the example code
• example_text: The text that describes an example
• example_code: The example itself, except the command_name and example_variable
• example_variable: The variables in the example

Currently supported attributes:

• foreground (color string, see below)
• background (color string, see below)
• underline (true or false)
• bold (true or false)

The currently supported colors are:

• black
• red
• green
• yellow
• blue
• purple
• cyan
• white

Example customization:

Bash Autocompletion

To get bash autocompletion, simply rename the file bash_tealdeer to tldr and copy it to /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/tldr.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Thanks to @SShrike for coming up with the name "tealdeer"!