Cheat: Supercharge Your Terminal Workflow with Custom Command Cheatsheets

In fast-paced technical environments, where efficiency and accuracy are paramount, tools like cheat become essential. This powerful command-line utility lets you create, manage, and view both personal and community-driven cheatsheets directly from your terminal.

What Is cheat?

cheat is a lightweight CLI utility (written in Go) designed for quick access to practical examples of command usage. While man pages offer extensive documentation and tldr gives community-written summaries, cheat fills a vital niche: custom, executable, and editable command notes for your day-to-day terminal operations.

This makes it especially helpful when working with:

• Complex commands (awk, sed, iptables, etc.)
• Workflow-specific variations (e.g., different docker configurations per environment)
• Rarely used but essential options or syntax

Why Not Just Use man, tldr, or Aliases?

• man pages are comprehensive but often verbose and slow to navigate.
• tldr is great for quick community-written summaries but not customizable out-of-the-box.
• Aliases or .bashrc/.zshrc entries are limited and not meant for structured documentation.

With cheat, you gain:

• Centralized, searchable documentation of your most-used commands
• Personal cheatsheets tailored to your tools, team, and environments
• Fully offline access once initialized

Installing cheat on Linux

For Debian/Ubuntu-based systems:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install cheat

Using Snap or Homebrew (also works on macOS):

sudo snap install cheat
# or on macOS
brew install cheat

On Arch Linux:

yay -S cheat
# or
sudo pacman -S cheat

Manual installation (latest binary from GitHub):

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/cheat/cheat/releases/download/4.4.2/cheat-linux-amd64.gz
gunzip cheat-linux-amd64.gz
chmod +x cheat-linux-amd64
sudo mv cheat-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/cheat

First-Time Setup

Just run cheat once to trigger automatic configuration:

cheat

This will:

• Generate ~/.config/cheat/conf.yml
• Set up default cheatpaths
• Download community cheatsheets

For better readability, edit your config and enable color output:

colorize: true

Creating Personal Cheatsheets

Here’s where cheat shines.

To create a cheatsheet for your docker networking commands:

cheat -e docker/networking

Example content:

---
syntax: Docker Networking
tags: [ docker, networking ]
---
// List networks
docker network ls

// Inspect bridge network
docker network inspect bridge

// Create a bridge
docker network create -d bridge dev-net

Later, simply retrieve it with:

cheat docker/networking

Search and Organization

cheat includes powerful search capabilities:

cheat -l                     # List all cheatsheets
cheat -l -p personal         # List personal only
cheat -l -t docker           # List by tag
cheat -s docker-compose      # Search string
cheat -r -s 'kubectl.*get'   # Regex search

You can also view cheat paths:

cheat -d

Pro Tips for DevOps Teams

• ✅ Sync cheatsheets with Git across your team.
• ✅ Store by role: devops/kubernetes, security/audit, infra/networking
• ✅ Add shell aliases for fast access:

alias cheat-k8s='cheat devops/kubernetes'

Integration With Other Tools

• Works well alongside tldr, bat, fzf, and ripgrep
• Version control your personal cheatsheets in ~/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/
• Can be used even on macOS (via Homebrew), making it cross-platform friendly

Final Thoughts

cheat is more than a utility—it’s your own terminal knowledge base. For sysadmins, SREs, or anyone who juggles multiple tools and environments daily, it can significantly speed up your workflow while reducing cognitive overhead.

Combined with Git for version control and organized into roles or topics, it becomes an indispensable tool in modern Linux systems administration.