Cheat Sheets

While output from --help can be useful, many people just don’t read it or understand the particular format and syntax shown. Instead, a quick cheat sheet style help can often be more helpful.

There is a great utility called cheat that solves this problem in a generic manner, by allowing searching, indexing and rendering of cheat sheets in your terminal.

$ cheat tar
# To extract an uncompressed archive:
tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar

# To extract a .tar in specified Directory:
tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar -C /path/to/destination/

We like this format and want to make it available to your App Builder apps, since 0.0.7 it is possible to add cheat sheets to your application, access them without needing to install the cheat command but also integrate them with that command if you choose.

Cheats are grouped by label, so while your application might have natsctl report jetstream the cheats are only 1 level deep and does not need to match the names of commands.

Example

Let’s see an example, we’ll update the example from the quick start to have cheats:

name: demo
description: Demo application for Choria App Builder
author: https://github.com/choria-io/appbuilder

cheat:
  tags:
    - mycorp
    - cows
  label: demo # this would be the default if not given
  cheat: |
    # To say something using a cow
    demo say hello

    # To think something using a cow
    demo think hello    

commands:
  - name: say
    description: Say something using the configured command
    type: exec
    cheat:
      cheat: |
        # This command can be configured using the Cowsay configuration
        Cowsay: /usr/bin/animalsay        
    command: |
            {{ default .Config.Cowsay "cowsay" }} {{ .Arguments.message | escape }}
    arguments:
      - name: message
        description: The message to send to the terminal
        required: true

When we run it we see:

usage: demo [<flags>] <command> [<args> ...]

Demo application for Choria App Builder

Contact: https://github.com/choria-io/appbuilder

Use 'demo cheat' to access cheat sheet style help

Commands:
  say <message>
....

Since we added 2 cheats just running demo cheat will show a list:

$ demo cheat
Available Cheats:

    demo
    say

And we can access the cheat sheet directly:

$ demo cheat demo
# To say something using a cow
demo say hello

# To think something using a cow
demo think hello

Integrate with cheat

The cheat is great, and I really suggest you check it out, if you have it installed you can export all the cheats from your builder app into it:

$ demo cheat --save /home/rip/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/demo
Saved cheat to /home/rip/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/demo/demo
Saved cheat to /home/rip/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/demo/say

With this done you can simply do cheat demo/say, or find all the cheats tagged mycorp which is one of the tags we added to ours:

$ cheat -l -t mycorp
title:    file:                                                  tags:
demo/demo /home/rip/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/demo/demo cows,mycorp,personal
demo/say  /home/rip/.config/cheat/cheatsheets/personal/demo/say  cows,mycorp,personal