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fechin/reference

★ 10,466EJSAudience · developerComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A community-maintained website of single-page cheat sheets for programming languages, developer tools, databases, and editors, covering Python, JavaScript, Docker, Git, Vim, and dozens more, for quick syntax lookups without reading full documentation.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((reference))
    What it is
      Cheat sheet site
      Community maintained
      Self-hostable
    Languages covered
      Python JS Go
      Rust C C++
      PHP Bash Java
    Tools covered
      Docker Git Vim
      VS Code Emacs
      MySQL Redis
    Contribution
      EJS templates
      Pull requests
      New sheets welcome
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Quickly look up Python, JavaScript, or Go syntax on a single page without opening full documentation

USE CASE 2

Find keyboard shortcuts for VS Code, Vim, or Emacs all in one place during a coding session

USE CASE 3

Self-host the cheat sheet site for an internal engineering team or contribute a new sheet for a tool your team uses

Tech stack

EJSJavaScript

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
License not specified in the explanation.

In plain English

Reference is a website that collects developer cheat sheets in one place. A cheat sheet is a single-page summary of the most commonly used commands, syntax, or shortcuts for a programming language or tool, intended for quick lookups rather than learning from scratch. The live site is at cheatsheets.zip. The collection covers a wide range of topics. On the programming side, there are sheets for languages including Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, Rust, C, C++, PHP, Bash, and others. There are also sheets for web technologies like HTML, CSS, and jQuery, configuration file formats like YAML, TOML, and INI, and developer tools like Docker, Vim, Git, and regular expressions. Beyond programming languages and tools, the collection includes cheat sheets for areas like Linux commands, databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB), keyboard shortcuts for editors like VS Code and Emacs, and network-related topics. There is also a section covering Chinese-language resources, and the project has a sibling version in Chinese. The project is community-maintained. Anyone can submit a new cheat sheet or improve an existing one by contributing to the repository. The cheat sheets are built using EJS, a templating language, and the result is a static website. The README notes that the original domain quickref.me was acquired by another company, the current maintained domain is cheatsheets.zip. This is not software you install and run. It is a website with source files that can be self-hosted or contributed to. The README is focused on listing what cheat sheets are available and explaining how to contribute new ones. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to add a new cheat sheet page for the Prisma ORM to the Reference project, including the EJS template structure and how to register it in the navigation
Prompt 2
I want to self-host the cheatsheets.zip site on my own server, walk me through building the project and serving it with nginx
Prompt 3
What is the quickest way to find and use the Docker cheat sheet from the Reference site, and which commands does it cover?
Prompt 4
How do I contribute a fix or improvement to an existing cheat sheet in the Reference repo via a pull request?
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