
tldr
Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands ๐.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Jul 2026
tldr replaces man pages with something you'll actually read. Type `tldr tar` and you get the handful of commands people actually use, with real examples, instead of forty screens of flags. It's community-maintained, the content is CC-licensed, and every official client is open source and free.
There's nothing to host. Install a client with `npm i -g tldr`, `pipx install tldr`, or `brew install tlrc`, and you're done. There's even a browser version if you don't want to install anything, and it works offline once the pages are cached.
Solo or team, it's free for everyone, so the only real question is whether it earns a spot in your muscle memory. For common tools it will. The catch is coverage: it's crowd-sourced, so popular commands are excellent and obscure ones are thin or missing. When tldr comes up short you're back to man or the tool's own docs, so keep both.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Content is CC-licensed, every official client is open source. Self-hosted: N/A, it's a CLI client plus a browser version. Paid: None from the project.
Completely free and open source. Paid cheat-sheet apps exist, but nothing here needs a subscription.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free
- Small team
- free
- Larger team
- free
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Trust Signals
License: CC BY 4.0
Content license, not a code license. Use freely with attribution.
Commercial use: โ Yes
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