Cheats
Search, insert, and save snippets from Cheatsheet without leaving VS Code.
Cheatsheet is a personal cheat-sheet web app for storing code and command snippets ("cheats"), searchable and organized by type. This extension connects to your Cheatsheet account so you can pull a snippet straight into your editor, or push a new one back up, without switching to the browser.
Free to search. A free Cheatsheet account is all you need for search and insert, no card required. Creating cheats from VS Code needs a Pro plan, see Plans and limits below.
Getting started
- On cheats.aarontrotter.com, sign in (or create a free account) and go to
/user. In the API Access section, generate an API key. Pick read-only if you just want to search, or read + write if you also want to create cheats from VS Code (Pro required for write, see below).
- Back in VS Code, open the Command Palette (
Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P) and run Cheats: Set API Key, then paste the key in. It's kept in VS Code's secure SecretStorage, never written to a settings file.
- You're set. Try typing
/cheats in any file to search.
What you can do
Search while you type
Type /cheats followed by your search terms anywhere in an editor, for example /cheats react hook. After a couple of characters, IntelliSense lists matching cheats, ranked by relevance. Accept a suggestion and it replaces what you typed with the full snippet.
Search a selection
Select some text (or just place your cursor in a word) and run Cheats: Search Selection (Ctrl+Alt+/, or Cmd+Alt+/ on Mac). It fills a search box with your selection, shows the matches in a quick-pick list, and replaces the selection with whichever result you choose.
Save a snippet back to Cheatsheet
Select the code you want to keep and run Cheats: Create Cheat from Selection (Ctrl+Alt+., or Cmd+Alt+. on Mac). You'll be asked for a title, a type (pick an existing one or type a new one), and whether it should be private, then your selection is saved as the cheat's body.
This needs a Pro account and a read + write API key (see Plans and limits). A few limits apply to the cheat itself, matching Cheatsheet's own rules:
- Title: required, 40 characters max
- Type: required, 15 characters max
- Body: 100 lines max, 600 characters per line max
- Whole cheat: 10KB max
Plans and limits
Cheatsheet has a free tier, and this extension's search and insert features work on it:
|
Free |
Pro (€2/month or €20/year) |
| Search & insert (this extension) |
✅ |
✅ |
| Create cheats (this extension) |
❌ |
✅ |
| API requests per day |
50 |
500 |
Want to create cheats from VS Code? Upgrade to Pro on the billing page. Pro also unlocks Vault (encrypted private notes) and Tasks on the site itself, alongside the higher API quota.
A couple of other things worth knowing:
- Search only shows cheats you can normally see: your own private ones, plus everything public.
- The daily API quota is shared across everything using your key, including Cheatsheet's Model Context Protocol integration if you use that too. Full API details live at cheats.aarontrotter.com/api-docs.
- Already have your own fork of Cheatsheet running elsewhere? Point
cheats.baseUrl in your VS Code settings at it instead.
Contributing
Want to work on the extension itself rather than just use it? Clone the repo, run npm install, then press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host with your changes loaded (it builds automatically first). Use npm run watch while actively editing to recompile on save.
