As far as I see there are different clients available as options. You don't necessarily need npm but I don't know in what shape the clients are. For example the go client seems broken to me (hard coded wrong tldr-page url, no caching, platform is always set to common) https://github.com/pranavraja/tldr I like the idea. Maybe I will create a better Go client.

You can use the python one. I tried it and the npm one and the npm one seems like it's in much better shape (colors were all screwed up on the python one). so, I guess YMMV