Cheat sheets for the shell

Interactive Cheat Sheet

© Lead Image © Stanislav Volchenkov, 123RF

© Lead Image © Stanislav Volchenkov, 123RF

Article from Issue 234/2020
Author(s):

When the history function fails and the manpage is too long, navi comes to the rescue with an interactive cheat sheet for the shell.

What exactly was that parameter for creating an archive with tar? Command-line aficionados know that if nothing shows up with the Bash history command, your only option is to look at the manpage. While manpages are generally useful, some are so extensive that the time spent searching for information is disproportionate to the task at hand. An alternative to this problem is an interactive cheat sheet.

While there are plenty of cheat sheet tools on GitHub, the relatively young navi [1] offers both good functionality and an eye-pleasing design. Navi helps users browse built-in (DIY or downloaded) cheat sheets to display options and arguments for commands or directly execute the commands. Navi (as well as similar tools) lets you interactively learn about newly discovered commands and explore all their possibilities.

Installation

You can quickly install navi from the website (Listing 1). In addition, you can optionally install navi in an arbitrary directory (line 6) instead of in your path.

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