Utilities

Excellent Utilities: navi – interactive cheatsheet tool

Excellent Utilities is a series of cornerstone articles highlighting essential utilities. These are small, indispensable tools, useful for anyone running a Linux machine.

navi is a terminal application which lets you run one-liners from cheatsheets. With this utility you can browse through cheatsheets and execute commands. Suggested values for arguments are dynamically displayed in a list.

navi uses fzf, skim, or Alfred under the bonnet and it can be either used as a command or as a shell widget. It’s free and open source software.

Installation

We tested navi primarily with the Manjaro, an Arch-based Linux distribution, but we also dabbled with the tool under Ubuntu.

For Manjaro, there’s a package in the Official Repositories (extra) which we installed using Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool).

Installing navi with Pamac

The project recommends navi is installed using brew.

Running navi for the first time will help you download and manage cheatsheets. By default, they are stored at ~/.local/share/navi/cheats/.

Download default cheatsheets for navi

We can view and install cheatsheets from various repositories with the command:

$ navi repo browse

navi repos

navi can also use cheatsheets from tldr and cheat.sh. For example, to install tldr in Manjaro, issue the command:

$ sudo pacman -S tldr

This is a cross-platform tool. Besides Linux, navi runs under Android, macOS and Windows.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary


Complete list of articles in this series:

Excellent Utilities
AES CryptEncrypt files using the Advanced Encryption Standard
AnanicyShell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities
brootNext gen tree explorer and customizable launcher
CerebroFast application launcher
cheat.shCommunity driven unified cheat sheet
CopyQAdvanced clipboard manager
crocSecurely transfer files and folders from the command-line
DeskreenLive streaming your desktop to a web browser
dufDisk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df
ezaA turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command
Extension ManagerBrowse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions
fdWonderful alternative to the venerable find
fkillKill processes quick and easy
fontpreviewQuickly search and preview fonts
horcruxFile splitter with encryption and redundancy
KoohaSimple screen recorder
KOReaderDocument viewer for a wide variety of file formats
ImagineA simple yet effective image optimization tool
LanguageToolStyle and grammar checker for 30+ languages
Liquid PromptAdaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh
lnavAdvanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting
lsdLike exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls
Mark TextSimple and elegant Markdown editor
McFlyNavigate through your bash shell history
mdlessFormatted and highlighted view of Markdown files
naviInteractive cheatsheet tool
notiMonitors a command or process and triggers a notification
NushellFlexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel
nvitopGPU process management for NVIDIA graphics cards
OCRmyPDFAdd OCR text layer to scanned PDFs
Oh My ZshFramework to manage your Zsh configuration
PaperworkDesigned to simplify the management of your paperwork
pastelGenerate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors
PDF Mix ToolPerform common editing operations on PDF files
pecoSimple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful
ripgrepRecursively search directories for a regex pattern
RnoteSketch and take handwritten notes
scrcpyDisplay and control Android devices
StickySimulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop
tldrSimplified and community-driven man pages
tmuxA terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow
TuskAn unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential
UlauncherSublime application launcher
WatsonTrack the time spent on projects
Whoogle SearchSelf-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine
ZellijTerminal workspace with batteries included
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