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So, just like most people it happens that my memory for shortcuts and commands is kind of bad until it gets into muscle memory, but since it is just painful to have a fancy configuration in vim + tmux + urxvt without knowing by memory its hundreds of shortcuts I was thinking if there is any practical way to store the shortcuts and assign tags to them or a description, and be able to look them up.

I mean, anything similar to Zeal/Dash (or this: http://devdocs.io/).

Note that I mean a custom made index with custom entries, not anything like a vim man page, or a Dash docset.

Also as a side note, I'd like to know how do you people get past the burden of starting to use those programs without knowing a lot of commands and key combos. Since this is a side question yet slightly related, don't answer for this, use the comments, or annex to the answer. Thanks.

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    The way I deal with it is: One small piece at a time. I don't try to learn the advanced features of multiple new pieces of software at the same time. The other thing I do is just keep a simple notes file with things I find useful, and delete them one at a time when I've managed to commit them to memory.
    – Heptite
    Apr 1, 2016 at 2:53
  • Noted. I'll try to build that plain text file, but its probably going to grow to 200-300 lines from vim alone, thats why I asked this question. :)
    – SOMN
    Apr 1, 2016 at 21:14

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This is hard to answer, because depending on your workflow, what works for you and what works for others may be vastly different. But I'm going to go ahead and make a recommendation: If you do most of your work from the command line, then I would recommend a solution that leverages this. Just start simple, and build up as your knowledge compounds upon itself. And it will.

I have a very rough, textual implementation of just the kind of system you describe, only I process and search my files using command line tools (shell functions, grep, etc).

Here's a Github link to my "notes" repository (you could use Dropbox, but I like Github, because git is available on pretty much every machine I run).

And here's a simple function to search these notes (Usage: notes <category> <pattern>):

function notes() {
    grep -r $HOME/notes/ -e $1 | grep --color -C 10 $2
}

Hopefully this gives you some fun ideas, I would just make two notes if you'd like to try some system similar to what I've described:

  1. Decide on a format for headers, comments, files; even if you end up later changing it.

  2. Maybe split up your files by Theory, Keyboard-Shortcuts, and Terminal-Commands.

I didn't do either of these things, and now my notes are a bit messy, and hard to really pin down sometimes.

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    So basically formatted text files and shell functions... hmm, ok, I can use that. Its not a great deal deal for files with thousands of entries, but for a hundred or two hundred lines it should be fine. :)
    – SOMN
    Apr 3, 2016 at 22:41

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