Cheat sheets in your terminal

After listening to episode 283 of The Changelog Podcast, I decided, that I want to use the awesome cheat sheet repository at Devhints on the commandline.

This is what I came up with: if you want to read the cheat sheet for React, download the Gist below, save it as hint and just type:

$ hint react

and, voila, the sheet appears.

GIF

The shell script needs both wget and mdless, which you can install using your favorite package manager. The sheets are fetched from Devhints.IO's Github repository.

Sheet files are cached in $HOME/.hack and can be refreshed using the --refresh command line argument.

If you like the idea of cheat sheets in your terminal, you might also want to checkout TLDR, which explains tools using examples - basically it just reverses the classic man pages ;)

Anyway...

Let me know if you have a better way or some idea for improving this tiny snippet:

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	type wget >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "I require wget but it's not installed."; exit 1; }
	type mdless >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "I require mdless but it's not installed."; exit 1; }
	TOOL=${1:?Usage: hack.sh <toolname> [--refresh]}
	REFRESH=${2:-no}
	RAW_MD_URL="https://raw.github.com/hazeorid/devhints.io/gh-pages/${TOOL}.md"
	CACHE_DIR=$HOME/.hack/
	LOCAL_CACHE_FILE=$CACHE_DIR/${TOOL}.md
	if [ ! -d $CACHE_DIR ]; then
	mkdir -p $CACHE_DIR
	fi
	if [ "$REFRESH" == "--refresh" ] || [ ! -e $LOCAL_CACHE_FILE ]; then
	wget -q -O - $RAW_MD_URL | sed -e '/^{: /d' > $LOCAL_CACHE_FILE
	fi
	if [ -s $LOCAL_CACHE_FILE ]; then
	mdless $LOCAL_CACHE_FILE 2>/dev/null
	else
	echo No cheat sheet found!
	fi

view raw hint.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is a cross post of http://koenighotze.de/hack/devhints.html

Comments

[Wolfgang Blessen]

Is there a way to list all the cheat sheets, that are available ?

[John Pham]

Looking at the repo, you could fetch the page and iterate through all the .md files.

[David Schmitz]

...actually this is a cool idea. You type 'hack got' and get "did you mean hack git"

[David Nguyen]

this is an interesting idea. I modified the script a bit, just for fun: gist.github.com/hpcsc/bebea8b364a5...

What the modified script does:

• use fzf to interactively select file
• can be used to search for markdown file in any github repo, not only restricted to devhints.io. devhints.io is still the default github repo to search if no argument is provided
• store caches files according to github owner/repo structure

[J. Pichardo]

Hi man, you might want to check the script, you missed a $ in lines 14 and 15, $CACHE_DIR.

Regards

[David Schmitz]

Thanks a lot ;) Updated.