cheats

cheats is a command line utility that allows you to define interactive cheat sheets for the command line. This is intended mainly for command that you use frequently, but not frequently enough to remember them.

cheats was inspired by cheat by chrisallenlane, although it contains none of its code. There is also a bash reimplementation of cheat by jahendrie.

Installation

• Automatic installation: Run install.sh.
• Manual installation: Put cheats.sh somewhere and source it on bash startup (for example, echo -en '\n\n' | cat - cheats.sh >> ~/.bashrc), then copy the cheats folder into your home folder (cp -r cheats ~/.cheats).
• To update an existing installation, you can run install.sh again or manually update cheats.sh and the .cheats folder.

Usage

$ cheats dd
dd 1
Backup your primary drive
dd if=/dev/sda of=$backup
------------------------------------------------
dd 2
Burn a disc image
dd if=$file of=/dev/cdrom

$ cheats dd 1
Backup your primary drive
dd if=/dev/sda of=$backup
Backup file path> [prompt]
[dd runs]

If the argument(s) match(es) exactly one cheat, then that cheat is run. Otherwise, all matching cheats are printed, and you can select one.

Defining cheats

Cheats are placed in the ~/.cheats directory, with one file per cheat. Each cheat has the following format:

One-line description
The command itself, where $variables can be defined like $this
variablename:Prompt
# comment line
other_variable:Prompt 2
...

Any variables that you declare from the third line on will be prompted from the user and placed into the command where necessary. (It's completely okay if the variable isn't in the command; this is useful for “Are you sure?“ type prompts where you don't care about the input, but want the user to press enter before taking action.) Any variables left in the command after the prompts are inserted are replaced by bash, if they are present (things like $PWD, $PS1 etc.). Comment lines are only allowed in the “prompts” section (beginning with the third line) and must start with a ‘#’ (no preceding whitespace is allowed).

System requirements

cheats was written for bash, and by now it contains so much bash-specific syntax that running it on other shells may require considerable porting efforts. I have tested the following shells:

• sh: Not going to happen. Sorry.
• zsh: Displaying cheats works, running them only works if they don’t contain variables. Completion doesn’t work either. There might be a relatively simple fix for running cheats if you know zsh (completion will probably need a rewrite), but I don’t. If you think you can fix it, off to CONTRIBUTING.md with you!
• csh, ksh: Doesn't work at all. I also have no knowledge of these shells, so I don't know if it even could work.

Apart from Bash features and builtins, only the tput external command is used. Most package managers include it in the “ncurses” package.

License

The content of this repository is released under the MIT License as provided in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.

By submitting a "pull request" or otherwise contributing to this repository, you agree to license your contribution under the license mentioned above.