If you're already down to the command line, running UNIX commands, and using TLDR you are way beyond "buying fish at the supermarket".
And why should you "learning how to use those tools", when what you really want from those tools are the use cases TLDR already covers?
My eyeballs are strained from rolling every time I read some very sage person on SO or HN reply to a well-phrased question or comment with a terse "it's all in the docs".
As if 90% of use cases aren't covered by 5 examples. As if we all have unlimited time to spend on reading docs and manpages and "learning how to use the tools". As if there is some intrinsic virtue to "learning how to use the tools". As if the very purpose of sites like SO are something other than distilling the information in docs into some other, more readable form. As if there are no man pages or docs that are absolutely incomprehensible and worth ignoring.
No, sorry, this attitude is just another manifestation of standard tech machismo: "real men do it the hard way". Good luck with that!
But I agree completely. The entire point of computers is doto mechanize doing things, to essentially be "lazy", aka more efficient.
In the `tar` case if you know what c, x, v, z and f stand for you can cover 99% of the tar use cases because those can be combined. You learn 5 letters and have now access to 8 different commands (`{c,x}[v][z]f`). Learn one more letter, `t`, and you can combine it with your existing knowledge to have 3 more commands (tf, tvf, tzvf).
Tl;dr: Blame the software stack.
At least personally, I need to do thing X and to achieve that I know I need to use tool Y. I read the man page of Y and very satisfyingly do the thing X. A month from now I have to do something similar to X and cannot for the life of me remember what freakish incantations need to be performed in order to do the same thing so I have to go through the man page again. This is where I'd like the tl/dr of it. I don't need Y often enough to actually warrant spending much time on learning to use the niche cli it requires..
The important first step in learning how to use a command line tool is to have a first working example, i.e. you've made the tool do something you wanted. From there, all you need to know is how to find out more about what it can do. Skim read through some examples, anything else you think could be useful? Try it out. The rest can be forgotten. There's no harm in keeping knowledge outside our memory if we know how to research it if needed.
If you need more than the supermarket... then learn how to fish?
There's always a wrong way to use something. The good thing is that this is not being promoted as a replacement, but rather a helpful addition. I see it very useful as an alternative to hunting down for tutorials before you want to use some tool to figure out the details (a good example in this case would be something like lxc/lxd) or as a quick memory jogger, the examples that can be provided in a tldr man page could even have a specific context, like a cheatsheet kind of a man page.
No, that’s not like saying that. `man tar` tells you which option to use for each use case; not the detailed algorithm of each compression algorithm.
Also perhaps have a tldr page on how to read man pages could be useful.
And then there are the sad misguided souls using fish as their login shells (I kid, I kid…).
+1 Comment of the day.