navi

navi is an interactive cheatsheet tool for the terminal. It lets you browse through command snippets, fill in arguments interactively, and execute them — all without leaving your shell. Think of it as a personal, searchable command reference that actually runs the commands for you.

It ships with built-in access to community cheatsheet repositories and supports defining your own .cheat files, making it equally useful as a learning aid for new tools and as a productivity shortcut for commands you use regularly but can never quite remember.

Features

• Interactive fuzzy search — type to filter through thousands of snippets; powered by fzf or skim under the hood
• Argument completion — snippet variables become interactive prompts; navi fills in your values before running
• Community cheatsheets — integrates with cheat.sh and the tldr-pages project out of the box
• Custom cheatsheets — write .cheat files in a simple format and navi picks them up automatically
• Shell widget — bind navi to a key (e.g. Ctrl+G) to trigger it inline while typing a command
• Shell agnostic — works with bash, zsh, fish, and others
• Variable types — variables can be filled by running a shell command, selecting from a list, or free-form input

Installation

cargo install navi

Or via your package manager:

# Debian / Fedora
# Pre-built Linux binaries are available on the
# [releases page](https://github.com/denisidoro/navi/releases).

# macOS
brew install navi

# Arch Linux
pacman -S navi

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.navi

Setup

Shell widget

The most useful feature is the shell widget, which lets you trigger navi with a key press while composing a command. Add this to your shell config:

# bash (~/.bashrc)
eval "$(navi widget bash)"

# zsh (~/.zshrc)
eval "$(navi widget zsh)"

# fish (~/.config/fish/config.fish)
navi widget fish | source

Then press Ctrl+G at any time to open the navi search UI. The selected command is pasted into your prompt, ready to edit or execute.

Fetch community cheatsheets

navi repo add https://github.com/denisidoro/cheats
navi repo add https://github.com/denisidoro/navi-tldr-pages

Usage

# Open the interactive browser
navi

# Search for a specific topic immediately
navi --query "docker"

# Use cheat.sh as the backend
navi --cheatsh

# Browse tldr pages
navi --tldr

Writing Custom Cheatsheets

Cheatsheets are plain text files with a .cheat extension stored in ~/.local/share/navi/cheats/. The format is simple:

% git, version control

# Undo the last commit but keep changes staged
git reset --soft HEAD~1

# Undo the last commit and discard changes
git reset --hard HEAD~1

# Interactively rebase the last N commits
git rebase -i HEAD~<number_of_commits>

# Show the diff of a specific commit
git show <commit_hash>

% docker, containers

# Remove all stopped containers
docker container prune

# Tail logs for a container
docker logs -f <container_name>

# Open a shell in a running container
docker exec -it <container_name> <shell>

Variables wrapped in <angle_brackets> become interactive prompts when the snippet is selected.

Dynamic variable completion

Variables can be populated by running a shell command:

% kubernetes, k8s

# Get logs for a pod
kubectl logs -f <pod>

$ pod: kubectl get pods --no-headers | awk '{print $1}'

When you select the snippet, navi runs kubectl get pods and presents the output as a list for you to choose from — so <pod> is always populated with a real, current pod name.

Tips

• Store your .cheat files in a git repository and symlink them into ~/.local/share/navi/cheats/ to keep them backed up and in sync across machines
• Use navi --print to print the selected command instead of executing it — useful for scripting
• Combine with fzf or skim for the fastest possible fuzzy search experience