Lean Manpages

The cursor blinks. You type man ls and a wall of text floods the screen. Buried in it is the one flag you need, lost in obsolete options, platform caveats, and verbose history. Lean Manpages cut through all of this. They strip man pages to the essentials: syntax, common flags, short examples. No fluff, no scroll fatigue.

Lean Manpages focus on high-value, high-frequency usage. They load fast, read clean, and work the same across tools. Whether it’s grep, tar, or docker, Lean Manpages give you the command’s shape and function in under five seconds. The goal is not to replace canonical man pages but to create a streamlined layer optimized for speed of understanding.

In practice, Lean Manpages work by curating a minimal subset of information from the broader man page. Each page starts with a concise command synopsis. Next comes the most-used options with plain descriptions. Finally, targeted examples that actually run as written. No deprecated flags, no tangents on system-specific quirks unless critical.

Developers spend hours each week looking things up. Every extra sentence and poorly organized section costs attention. Lean Manpages save cognitive load, reduce context switching, and make CLI mastery faster. For teams, they become a shared baseline—no more contradictions between what’s in your head and what’s on your screen.

The format is portable. It fits inside terminal UIs, static docs, web search snippets, and code editors. It integrates easily with internal knowledge bases. You can cache them locally or version them with the rest of your tooling. The entire point: fast recall with minimal mental overhead.

You shouldn’t have to scan a thousand words to remember how tar excludes a directory. Lean Manpages exist so you don’t have to. See them live in minutes with hoop.dev and strip every command back to its core.