Meet the Cheat

Robby Russell — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:37:00 -0600

Hey! You’re a cheater!

Well, if you’re not… I’m hoping to make one out of you.

“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”—W. C. Fields

I’m a fan of the PDF cheat sheets as I like the consolidated content contained in them. However, I don’t like having to read PDFs any more than I have to. Printing them isn’t always ideal either as I really don’t like to carry around extra paper in my laptop bag. So, what are we to do?

Well, you can cheat the system! ...and I’m going to show you how!

Cheat is this really nice command-line tool that outputs a plain text cheat sheet whenever and wherever you want.

Install the Cheat

Like all the happy and good Rubygems, this is quite simple…


$ sudo gem install cheat

Done! Okay… let’s try to do some cheating. Don’t worry, your friends and family will forgive you.

Becoming a Cheat(er)

To view a cheat sheet, just run the cheat command from your favorite terminal window.

$ cheat _cheat name_

So, for example… to see the cheat sheet for RSpec, run cheat rspec.


    $ cheat rspec
    rspec:
      INSTALL
      =======
      $ sudo gem install rspec

      $ ./script/plugin install
      svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/REL_X_Y_Z/vendor/rspec_on_rails/vendor/p
      ugins/rspec
      Where X_Y_Z is the version number.

      $ ./script/generate rspec
            create  spec
            create  spec/spec_helper.rb
            create  spec/test2spec.erb
            create  test/test2spec_help.rb
            create  script/rails_spec
            create  script/rails_spec_runner

      HOW TO USE
      ==========
      ./script/generate rspec_model User

####################################################
# truncated to save precious bandwidth
####################################################

Because this is all printing out in your shell, you can take advantage of your favorite command line tools.

Piping to grep


$ cheat rspec | grep 'equal' 
      @user.errors.on(:username).should_equal "is required" 
  target.should_equal <value>
  target.should_not_equal <value>

Piping to TextMate

$ cheat rspec | mate

Find more Cheats

Head over to this list of cheats to see what is currently available.