A cheat sheet is a guided set of steps that a user can perform. As well as being documentation, it can interactively launch specific operations in the Eclipse environment, so that the user not only achieves the task, but learns how to do it again in the future. Because of the tight integration with the UI, this is only possible in Eclipse 3.x applications and Eclipse 4.x with the 3.x workbench (in other words, not for Eclipse 4.x RCP applications as of Eclipse 4.4).
A cheat sheet is an XML file that has a top-level description and a number of item elements that have a title and description. The idea is to provide a series of steps, like a bulleted list, to perform and in turn achieve a particular goal.
For example, a cheat sheet to create a Java project might start off by giving an introduction of what the cheat sheet is about with an initial step. The following can be saved in cheatsheets/javaApplication.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ...