How to use cheat: view, create and search command-line cheatsheets

What cheat does and who it is for

cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command line. You type a command name and it shows you examples you can copy. The project was built to remind *nix system administrators of options for commands they use often but not often enough to remember.

It is a good fit if you work on Unix-like systems, forget command syntax between uses, or want personal command notes in plain text. It is not a graphical or web app, and it is not a beginner tutorial: it shows reference snippets rather than explanations.

Install cheat

The README does not list install commands in full. It points to INSTALLING.md in the repository for installation and configuration instructions. Read that file first, since it covers the steps for your system.

cheat is written in Go, so the project's install guide is the place to check how to get a working binary onto your machine.

View a cheatsheet with cheat tar

Run the command name after cheat to see its cheatsheet. The README's example shows a sheet for tar with entries such as extracting an uncompressed archive and creating a .gz archive. Each entry is a comment followed by a command you can copy.

Nested sheets use a path. A top-level sheet is viewed by name, and a nested one by folder and name.

• cheat tar opens the top-level tar sheet.
• cheat foo/bar opens the nested sheet named bar in a foo subdirectory.

Create and edit your own cheatsheets

Use the -e flag to edit a sheet. If the sheet does not exist, cheat creates it. Cheatsheets are plain-text files with no file extension, named after the command used to view them.

You can add an optional YAML frontmatter header to set tags and the syntax used for highlighting. Syntax highlighting is provided by Chroma, and the syntax value can be any lexer name Chroma supports.

• Plain-text files with no file extension.
• Optional frontmatter with tags and syntax.
• Highlighting covers any Chroma lexer name.

List, filter and search sheets

Several flags help you find sheets. -l lists all available cheatsheets, and -b gives a brief list with names and tags only. You can combine -l with -t to filter by tag, or with -p to limit results to one cheatpath. -d shows your configured cheatpaths.

To search the text of your sheets, use -s. Add -r to treat the search as a regular expression. The README notes that flags can be combined.

• -d shows configured cheatpaths.
• -l lists all sheets; -b lists names and tags only.
• -l -t networking lists sheets tagged networking.
• -s ssh searches for the phrase ssh.

Set up cheatpaths for personal and shared sheets

Cheatsheets live on cheatpaths, which are directories set in the conf.yml file. A common pattern is one cheatpath per repository. Setting readonly to true stops cheat from editing or creating sheets on that path, which helps avoid merge conflicts on upstream repositories. If you edit a sheet on a read-only path, cheat copies it to a writeable directory first.

A directory-scoped .cheat directory is also found by searching the current directory and its ancestors, similar to how git finds .git. Its nearest copy is temporarily added to the cheatpaths.

• name, path, tags and readonly are set per cheatpath.
• Put a .cheat directory at a project root to make its sheets available in subdirectories.

Turn on shell completion

cheat can generate completion scripts for bash, zsh, fish and powershell with the --completion flag. Redirect the output to the location your shell reads. Completions include cheatsheet names, tags and cheatpath names.

The README gives these examples. Choose the line for your shell, and check your shell's documentation if your completion directory differs.

• bash: user-local or system-wide location.
• zsh: a directory on your fpath.
• fish: ~/.config/fish/completions.