Notice: This repository is an independent fork of cheat/cheat. The code that has been modified or added by me is licensed under LICENSE.

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.

Use cheat with cheatsheets.

Example

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

cheat view tar

You will be presented with a cheatsheet resembling the following:

# 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/'

Usage

To view a cheatsheet:

cheat view tar      # a "top-level" cheatsheet
cheat view foo/bar  # a "nested" cheatsheet

To edit a cheatsheet:

cheat edit tar     # opens the "tar" cheatsheet for editing, or creates it if it does not exist
cheat edit foo/bar # nested cheatsheets are accessed like this

To view the configured cheatpaths:

cheat dirs

To list all available cheatsheets:

cheat ls

To list all cheatsheets that are tagged with "networking":

cheat ls -t networking

To list all cheatsheets on the "personal" path:

cheat ls -p personal

To search for the phrase "ssh" among cheatsheets:

cheat search ssh

To search (by regex) for cheatsheets that contain an IP address:

cheat search -r '(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}'

Flags may be combined in intuitive ways. Example: to search sheets on the "personal" cheatpath that are tagged with "networking" and match a regex:

cheat search '(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}' -p personal -t networking --regex

Installing

# If you have mage installed:
mage

# Else:
go run mage.go

Cheatsheets

Cheatsheets are plain-text files with no file extension, and are named according to the command used to view them:

cheat view tar     # file is named "tar"
cheat view foo/bar # file is named "bar", in a "foo" subdirectory

Cheatsheet text may optionally be preceeded by a YAML frontmatter header that assigns tags and specifies syntax:

---
syntax: javascript
tags: [ array, map ]
---
// To map over an array:
const squares = [1, 2, 3, 4].map(x => x * x);

The cheat executable includes no cheatsheets, but [community-sourced cheatsheets are available][cheatsheets]. You will be asked if you would like to install the community-sourced cheatsheets the first time you run cheat.

Cheatpaths

Cheatsheets are stored on "cheatpaths", which are directories that contain cheatsheets. Cheatpaths are specified in the conf.yml file.

It can be useful to configure cheat against multiple cheatpaths. A common pattern is to store cheatsheets from multiple repositories on individual cheatpaths:

# conf.yml:
# ...
cheatpaths:
  - name: community                   # a name for the cheatpath
    path: ~/documents/cheat/community # the path's location on the filesystem
    tags: [ community ]               # these tags will be applied to all sheets on the path
    readonly: true                    # if true, `cheat` will not create new cheatsheets here

  - name: personal
    path: ~/documents/cheat/personal  # this is a separate directory and repository than above
    tags: [ personal ]
    readonly: false                   # new sheets may be written here
# ...

The readonly option instructs cheat not to edit (or create) any cheatsheets on the path. This is useful to prevent merge-conflicts from arising on upstream cheatsheet repositories.

If a user attempts to edit a cheatsheet on a read-only cheatpath, cheat will transparently copy that sheet to a writeable directory before opening it for editing.

Directory-scoped Cheatpaths

At times, it can be useful to closely associate cheatsheets with a directory on your filesystem. cheat facilitates this by searching for a .cheat folder in the current working directory. If found, the .cheat directory will (temporarily) be added to the cheatpaths.

Autocompletion

cheat help completion