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
Installing for all users (requires root)
Clone this repository and cd
into it, then run
sudo python setup.py install
Installing in your home directory
Clone this repository and cd
into it, then run
mkdir -p ~/bin
cp cheat ~/bin
mkdir ~/.cheat
cp cheatsheets/* ~/.cheat
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 or 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.)