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The Best General-Purpose Cheat Sheet Sites
Four collections that between them cover almost any tool, language, or command you will meet. They are not interchangeable, and knowing which to reach for is most of the value.
The other pages here point at the single best reference for a specific topic. This one is different: it collects the general-purpose hubs, the sites that have something for practically everything. When you hit an unfamiliar tool at an awkward moment, one of these four almost certainly covers it. They answer different questions though, and reaching for the wrong one is why people conclude a perfectly good site is useless.
01 · THE COLLECTIONS
Cover almost anything
The meta-collections worth a permanent bookmark.
- cheat.sh ↗A cheat sheet for nearly every command and language, right in your terminal or browser —
curl cheat.sh/gitand go.cheat.sh - Devhints ↗Hundreds of beautifully-formatted cheat sheets across languages, frameworks, and CLI tools. The gold standard.devhints.io
- QuickRef.me ↗A modern, searchable collection of clean quick references for programming and DevOps topics.quickref.me
- Learn X in Y Minutes ↗Whole languages and tools condensed into one heavily-commented example — the fastest orientation for anything new.learnxinyminutes.com
02 · CHOOSING
Which one answers which question
"I have never seen this language before"
Learn X in Y Minutes. Its whole format is one heavily commented file that walks through a language's syntax end to end. Reading it takes about fifteen minutes and leaves you able to read code in that language, which is a different and often more urgent need than being able to write it fluently. It is the right choice when you have inherited a codebase in something unfamiliar.
"I know this tool, I have forgotten the syntax"
Devhints or QuickRef. Both are organized as scannable single pages per topic, so you arrive knowing what you want and leave in a few seconds. Devhints has the larger and more carefully formatted catalog; QuickRef is more modern and has better search. Trying both on a topic you know well is the quickest way to find which layout suits you.
"I am in a terminal and do not want to open a browser"
cheat.sh. It serves plain text over HTTP, so a single request returns a usable answer without leaving the shell. It also aggregates from several sources behind the scenes, which means it often has something for obscure tools the curated sites skipped.
03 · WHEN A HUB IS THE WRONG TOOL
The limits of general collections
General collections trade depth for breadth, and that trade has consequences worth knowing before you rely on one.
For anything security-sensitive or version-specific, go to the official documentation instead. A community sheet may have been written against an older release, and with a tool that changed its defaults between versions, an out-of-date example is worse than no example because it looks authoritative. Official docs are slower to read and considerably more likely to be right about the version you are running.
Community collections also inherit their contributors' assumptions. An example may be correct on Linux and wrong on macOS, or assume a flag your build does not have. When a copied command behaves unexpectedly, checking the tool's own manual page is usually faster than trying variations.
04 · IN PRACTICE
Getting value out of them
The failure mode with general references is bookmarking all four and using none. A collection only helps if reaching for it is faster than searching, and that means having a default. Most people settle on one browser-based collection and cheat.sh in the terminal, which covers nearly everything without the moment of deciding where to look.
These sites are also worth browsing rather than only searching. Reading a cheat sheet for a tool you already use regularly tends to surface capabilities you never knew existed, because you only ever searched for things you already suspected were possible. Fifteen minutes with the sheet for your primary editor or shell is one of the higher-return uses of idle time in this field.
05 · FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Are these cheat sheet sites free?
Yes. All four are free with no account required, and cheat.sh, Devhints, and Learn X in Y Minutes are open-source community projects that accept contributions.
Which cheat sheet site is best?
They answer different questions. Learn X in Y Minutes suits meeting a language for the first time, Devhints and QuickRef suit refreshing syntax you already know, and cheat.sh suits looking something up without leaving the terminal. Picking a default for each situation matters more than ranking them.
How do I use cheat.sh from the terminal?
It serves plain text over HTTP, so requesting a topic by name from the command line returns a usable answer directly in the shell. It also accepts natural-language queries for programming tasks and returns example code.
Can I trust community-maintained cheat sheets?
For everyday syntax, generally yes. For anything security-sensitive or version-specific, check the official documentation instead, since community examples can be written against older releases and an out-of-date example is more dangerous than none because it looks authoritative.
Why did a command I copied not work?
Often because of an assumption baked into the example, such as a different operating system or a tool version with different defaults or flags. Checking the tool's own manual page is usually quicker than trying variations.