Cheatsheets

Jeffrey Hardy,
Sep 5, 2007

I was going through some bookmarks today and I came across a few cheatsheets that I thought would be of interest to readers.

First, there’s Jens-Christian Fischer’s PDF cheatsheet for Rails. It doesn’t cover version 1.2, but most of the information is still relevant. When you need to look something up quickly, you can just search the PDF. Handy.

Another Rails cheatsheet I really like is from ilovejackdaniels.com. It’s a good quick reference that includes the default directory structure, predefined variables, reserved words, and more. Definitely one to check out.

If you’re looking for a Ruby-only cheatsheet, try RubyCheat on for size. And while technically not a cheatsheet, I also find ZenSpider’s Ruby QuickRef pretty useful when the PickAxe is not handy.

Choice Gem: cheat

Speaking of cheats, one of my favorite Ruby Gems as of late is Chris Wanstrath’s cheat.

As with all Ruby Gems, it’s easy to install:

$ sudo gem install cheat
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed cheat-1.2.1

Basic usage is straightforward: you run the cheat program and give it the name of the cheatsheet as an argument. So, if you forget all your MySql commands, you can just run cheat mysql.

Here’s another example, and one I use all the time—strftime (output truncated, of course):

$ cheat strftime
strftime:
    %a - The abbreviated weekday name (``Sun'')
    %A - The  full  weekday  name (``Sunday'')
    %b - The abbreviated month name (``Jan'')
    %B - The  full  month  name (``January'')
    ...

There are a bunch of Rails-related sheets which you can see by typing cheat rails. Here’s the full list:

  • radrails_rhtml
  • radrails_ruby
  • rails_console
  • rails_edge
  • rails_request_object
  • rails_reserved_words
  • rails_tasks
  • rails_to_s
  • rails_vim
  • test_spec_rails
  • textmate_rails

So, if you’re trying to check out a working copy of edge rails, but forget the path to the Rails subversion repository, you can quickly type cheat rails_edge to be reminded.

To see all available cheatsheets in a big long list, do this:

$ cheat sheets
All Cheat Sheets:
  arts
  as3_formulas
  ascii
  assertions
  assert_select
  association_methods
  awk
  balloon
  bash
  ...

Finally, to see more of what you can do with cheat, including examples and useful command line flags, use cheat’s own cheatsheet:

$ cheat cheat
cheat:
  Hey, welcome to cheat (http://cheat.errtheblog.com).
  Thanks for trying it out. 
  ...

Happy cheating!

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