First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.
This is just the first page of man dnf:
![the output of man dnf](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/man-dnf.png)
And this is tldr dnf:
![output of tldr dnf](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tldr-dnf.png)
That’s much, much more useful!
The other program I discovered is bat. Bat is a more useful version of cat because, among other things, it does code highlighting and line numbers.
Here’s plain old cat:
![output from running cat on a python file](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/cat-a-file.png)
Here’s bat:
![output from running bat on a python file](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/bat-a-file.png)
So much more useful!! I wouldn’t alias cat to bat because cat’s plain output is still great if you’re going to pipe it somewhere. But for just outputting a file to the console, you can’t beat bat.