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:

And this is tldr dnf:

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:

Here’s bat:

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.