tealdeer

tealdeer is a Rust implementation of the tldr-pages project — a community-driven alternative to man pages that focuses on practical examples rather than exhaustive documentation. Instead of reading through dense manual pages, you get a short, scannable list of the most common use cases for a command.

Features

• Fast — written in Rust, starts up and renders pages almost instantly
• Offline-first — pages are cached locally after the first update; no internet needed during use
• Wide coverage — thousands of pages covering commands across Linux, macOS, Windows, and more
• Customizable output — configure colors and style via a TOML config file
• Auto-update — can be configured to automatically refresh the cache after a set number of days

Installation

cargo install tealdeer

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install tealdeer

# Fedora
dnf install tealdeer

# Arch Linux
pacman -S tealdeer

# macOS
brew install tealdeer

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.tealdeer

Usage

# Update the local page cache (do this first)
tldr --update

# Look up a command
tldr tar

# Look up a command for a specific platform
tldr --os linux mount

# List all available pages
tldr --list

# Search pages by keyword
tldr --search "compress"

# Clear the local cache
tldr --clear-cache

Example output

Running tldr tar gives you something like:

tar
Archiving utility.

- Create an archive from files:
  tar cf {{target.tar}} {{file1}} {{file2}} {{file3}}

- Extract an archive into the current directory:
  tar xf {{source.tar}}

- Create a gzip-compressed archive:
  tar czf {{target.tar.gz}} {{file1}} {{file2}} {{file3}}

Configuration

tealdeer can be configured at ~/.config/tealdeer/config.toml:

[display]
compact = false
use_pager = false

[updates]
auto_update = true
auto_update_interval_hours = 720