cheat

cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line. It was designed to help remind *nix system administrators of options for commands that they use frequently, but not frequently enough to remember.

cheat depends only on python.

Examples

The next time you're forced to disarm a nuclear weapon without consulting Google, you may run:

cheat tar

You will be presented with a cheatsheet resembling:

To extract an uncompressed archive: 
tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar

To extract a .gz archive:
tar -xzvf /path/to/foo.tgz

To create a .gz archive:
tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tgz /path/to/foo/

To extract a .bz2 archive:
tar -xjvf /path/to/foo.tgz

To create a .bz2 archive:
tar -cjvf /path/to/foo.tgz /path/to/foo/

To see what cheatsheets are availble, run cheat with no arguments.

Note that, while cheat was designed primarily for *nix system administrators, it is agnostic as to what content it stores. If you would like to use cheat to store notes on your favorite cookie recipes, feel free.

Installing

Do the following to install cheat:

1. Clone this repository and cd into it
2. Run sudo ./install

The install script will copy a python file into /usr/local/bin/, and will also create a hidden .cheat folder (containing the cheatsheet content) in your home directory.

Modifying Cheatsheets

The value of cheat is that it allows you to create your own cheatsheets - the defaults are meant to serve only as a starting point, and can and should be modified.

Cheatsheets are stored in the ~/.cheat/ directory, and are named on a per-keyphrase basis. In other words, the content for the tar cheatsheet lives in the ~/.cheat/tar file. To add a cheatsheet for a foo command, you would create file ~/.cheat/foo, whereby that file contained the cheatsheet content.

Note that cheat supports "subcommands" simply by naming files appropriately. Thus, if you wanted to create a cheatsheet not only (for example) for git but also for git commit, you could do so be creating cheatsheet files of the appropriate names (git and git commit).

After you've customized your cheatsheets, I urge you to track ~/.cheat/ along with your dotfiles.

Setting a CHEATPATH

By default, all cheatsheets are installed to ~/.cheat/, but you can instruct cheat to look for cheatsheets in other directories by exporting a CHEATPATH environment variable:

export CHEATPATH=/path/to/my/cheats

You may, of course, append multiple directories to your CHEATPATH:

export CHEATPATH=$CHEATPATH:/path/to/more/cheats

Contributing

If you would like to contribute cheetsheets for program functionality, please fork this repository, make your chanages, and send me a pull request.

Related Projects

• lucaswerkmeister/cheats: An implementation of this concept in pure bash that also allows not only for numerical indexing of subcomands but also supports running commands interactively.

• jahendrie/cheat: A bash-only implmentation that additionally allows for cheatsheets to be created and grep searched from the command-line. (jahendrie contributed key ideas to this project as well.)