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.

Example

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 available, run cheat -l.

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

It is recommended to install cheat with pip:

pip install cheat --user

(You must ensure that the Location identified by pip show cheat exists on your PATH.)

Other installation methods are available.

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.

Provided that you have a CHEAT_EDITOR, VISUAL, or EDITOR environment variable set, you may edit cheatsheets with:

cheat -e foo

If the foo cheatsheet already exists, it will be opened for editing. Otherwise, it will be created automatically.

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

Configuring

Setting a CHEAT_USER_DIR

Personal cheatsheets are saved in the ~/.cheat directory by default, but you can specify a different default by exporting a CHEAT_USER_DIR environment variable:

export CHEAT_USER_DIR='/path/to/my/cheats'

Setting a CHEAT_PATH

You can additionally instruct cheat to look for cheatsheets in other directories by exporting a CHEAT_PATH environment variable:

export CHEAT_PATH='/path/to/my/cheats'

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

export CHEAT_PATH="$CHEAT_PATH:/path/to/more/cheats"

You may view which directories are on your CHEAT_PATH with cheat -d.

Enabling Syntax Highlighting

cheat can optionally apply syntax highlighting to your cheatsheets. To enable syntax highlighting, export a CHEAT_COLORS environment variable:

export CHEAT_COLORS=true

Note that pygments must be installed on your system for this to work.

cheat ships with both light and dark colorschemes to support terminals with different background colors. A colorscheme may be selected via the CHEAT_COLORSCHEME envvar:

export CHEAT_COLORSCHEME=light # must be 'light' (default) or 'dark'

Specifying a Syntax Highlighter

You may manually specify which syntax highlighter to use for each cheatsheet by wrapping the sheet's contents in a Github-Flavored Markdown code-fence.

Example:

```sql
-- to select a user by ID
SELECT *
FROM Users
WHERE id = 100
```

If no syntax highlighter is specified, the bash highlighter will be used by default.

Enabling Search Match Highlighting

cheat can optionally be configured to highlight search term matches in search results. To do so, export a CHEAT_HIGHLIGHT environment variable with a value of one of the following:

• blue
• cyan
• green
• grey
• magenta
• red
• white
• yellow

Note that the termcolor module must be installed on your system for this to work.

See Also:

• Enabling Command-line Autocompletion
• Related Projects