To learn quickly all the aliases you need to use take a look at their descriptions (open the chars map page and click the alias you want to learn). There are some rules I kept in mind during the creations of each tag/alias association. (see Why did you chosen just THOSE chars aliases? on the faq page). Even if the reason of a tag association may sometimes seems to be silly, strange or in some ways forced, knowing them will help you a lot in making mental associations which will help you in remembering the whole set of aliases.
Comments are not part of the TRASHY feature set, but the way TRASHY is written lets you add comments to your code. This happens because when TRASHY finds an alias or a sequence which doesn't make sense, it jumps over this sequence and continues.
So you can start a nonsense tag/attribs sequence and use it as a comment. To do this use a character which is not used by TRASHY like the number 0 or the comma (,) and write a sequence of text unbroken by spaces, adding some text inside. You can use underscores in place of spaces, or if you don't like this way, use the character with code 160, which is an alternate space character.
Just remember to use only lowercase characters to write your comment, because some uppercase characters will be recognized as tag aliases and then expanded as HTML.
Do not confuse letter aliases like I (used for INS) or B (used for BLOCKQUOTE) with single-letter-HTML-tags like <I> (italic style) or <B> (bold style).
Remember not to trust the parenthesis-finder of your text editor, because left and right parenthesis are NEVER used to enclose things, as they normally would be!
To know in one step how many open tags remains to close, to finish your page, simply add this php line at the end of your code:
echo'<pre>'.print_r($history).'</pre>';
and then reload the page in your browser. You will see the list of open tags written somewhere in the page. When you've fixed your code with the required close-tags-aliases, remember to remove the line you just added.
If you're still at the beginning, you will find useful the quick reference page (refquick.txt): open it with a text editor using a fixed width font and print it, to get all the informations you need in your hand.
To see more code examples, open with your text editor one the php files of this documentation. :)
