Ask HN: How do you memorize the tons of commands related to rails?

Back in the day, I had Amy Hoy's Rails cheatsheet printed out next to my work desk, and I referred to it pretty constantly for the first few weeks. ~6 years later all of the common stuff is second-nature and the esoteric stuff is either a) somewhere in one of my codebases or b) on Google.

Realistically, you only need to memorize a few:<p>- rake test: run the entire test suite<p>- rails s: run the rails server<p>- rails c: opens up an IRB&#x2F;pry session with your Rails app<p>- rails g migration: create a new migration<p>- rake db:migrate - Run new migrations<p>- rake db:create - create the DB the first time<p>- rake db:schema:load - generate the DB from schema.rb<p>- rake db:setup - generate a new database from migrations<p>- rake routes - Spit out the routes and path helpers<p>Don&#x27;t ever use rails generate model&#x2F;controller. It generates so much garbage that you likely won&#x27;t need.<p>There are a bunch of other commands off of rake db:migrate but most aren&#x27;t needing to be memorized. Our brains are only so large and dense and mine is particularly small, memorize what is important and memorize how to look up the rest.

Let me get the plug in first: if you are on a Mac, try Dash, the app that looks up docs for you. I have it mapped to a keystroke in emacs, and I can sometimes park the cursor atop, say, the word &#x27;render&#x27; and look it up in one motion.<p>(Sometimes it takes more motions, because Dash knows the docs for everything and sometimes doesn&#x27;t get the context right, but that might also be driver error: the app is always politely telling me that I could learn to use it even better.)<p>Docs aren&#x27;t always the best tool but it is good to have them at your fingertips.<p>patio11 is on to something when he suggests using your own codebases. Keep them all on your machine. Learn how to search them. (I use emacs and its various project-directory search utilities like Projectile and Helm, but there are other tools.)<p>If you don&#x27;t have any Rails codebases to refer to yet, Michael Hartl is here to help you.<p>Your personal library is best because it comes from your perspective and with your memory cues. It also only covers use cases you have actually seen, which sounds like a bug but which is actually a feature. The problem with trying to use public docs as references is that they cover all the features that you will never use.<p>One drawback of your personal library is that it will always feel obsolete. This is a good thing; it means you are improving. Fix it up in bits and pieces where you can. Borrow ideas from the pages you Google.<p>There is a school of thought which says that you should use your public Github profile as your personal library. Having dabbled in this for a while, I now reject it. Do not write your notes for an audience larger than one. The amount of time you spend thinking &quot;is it dangerous or embarrassing to record this line of code in my private personal repo?&quot; should be zero. If there is anything worse than having the internet read over your shoulder, it is <i>imagining</i> the internet reading over your shoulder. Buy a big private Github account, use Bitbucket, or run a private server for your hacks and notes.<p>Take notes on everything you do. In particular, get in the habit of pasting the command-line things that you do into a cheat sheet. This is the beginning of devops wisdom. One reason why the advanced deployer does everything with a script (or Vagrantfile, or Dockerfile) is that the script remembers the steps for you and can be looked up later.

Download anki or mnemnosyne or supermemo or any other Spaced Repetition System program. Add the 50 or so most common commands to it and what they do. If you set it to test you on 10 new commands a day you will know all of them cold within two weeks at five minutes a day.

I use Anki[0] to learn and memorize tons of command line tools and Vim motions. It takes a couple minutes every day. Doing this in combination with actually using the tools brings fluency rather quickly.<p>[0] <a href="http://ankisrs.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ankisrs.net</a>