I am against the move to atom for several reasonsI am not a big lover of nano but over the course of teaching computing skills to meteorology students for 20 years and working with the Carpentries for 3+ years nano works for a first editor for several reasons.
The first reason goes to the core of what we learned as instructors, cognitive overload. On top of all the new information a learner is receiving regarding shell, nano has the feature of all the important commands being listed at the bottom of the editor. Nothing needs to be learned about the editor. Fire it up, edit the file and when the question comes how to quit, how to save, a learner just looks at the list at the bottom. The one item to learn is that ^ means the Control key and then the letter following the ^ are hit in sequence, holding down the Control key. It is simple and bare bones. Nothing more complex to learn than that. This leads to the one quirk of Atom. Where is the open file option in any of the menus? There is no directory tree or option window to have a person move to a file outside of the directory that atom was evoked. You now need to switch teaching about the shell to now teaching about how Atom revolves around projects and that a project is a directory and it you want to open a file not seen in the file listing window, you open a new project folder. The file listing tree looks nothing like a OSX Finder or MS FileExplorer window. The concept adds a layer of abstraction that is not about the shell, but about project/file system management that is a distraction not a help. It is not Notepad or TextEdit which most learners will have in used their prior experiences with GUI editors that are not Office. Is nano perfect. Oh no. It in actuality terrible for code or long document editing. But keep in mind that we as instructors may have some expert bias creeping in. Think back to when you first started (ok, I am showing my age) when the choices were vi (not vim), emacs and this little editor that installed with pine called nano. We talk about in the Carpentries that our learners come to the workshops to learn that there are better ways to work. Editor choices work the same way. Starting out nano is fine, but as one learns more, they realize that there may be a better way. They can then work that out for themselves. I point this out to the learners in a work shop that after the workshop, when revisiting the lessons, they may want to work with a text editor that more fits their workflows and personal preferences. But during the course of learning shell, git and a programing language, I do not want to spend any more time than I have to other than to say “All the editing commands that you will need to use are at the bottom of your screen and the hat or carrot symbol means that you type and hold the control key and then the letter, follow and answer the questions and you should be back at the prompt in your shell”. Most of the issues raised in this discussion are valid but not appropriate for beginners but in line with intermediate and advance users. There are work arounds for when nano does not install. For MS Windows, just have the learner type in the gitbash “start notepad [file]” and this will open notepad (or notepad++). Most beginning learners will have some familiarity with notepad. (For OSX, it is “open file.txt”.) Finally, the issue of installing a linux emulated environment of MS Windows will be much easier when leaners all be on Windows 10. With the latest OS, they can install the developer package for Ubuntu. Then git and nano are just apt-get install nano git. https://www.howtogeek.com/?p=249966 -mjl ------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Laufersweiler [email protected] Bad weather looks best through an open window. > On Mar 30, at 4:58 AM, Raniere Silva <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > today at the workshop, > one of the our Windows learners asked me why after quit nano the > previous command weren't available when scroll the window up. > The learner was very annoyed to not be able to see the history. > > I would like to motion to change nano with Atom as the recommended/default > text editor for our workshops. I don't want to start yet another flame war, > we already had lots and lots of discussion about this, > so I will summarise the benefits and drawback of my proposal. > I will ask that before suggest another text editor instead of Atom, > stop and think that the text editor will benefit novice learners > instead of just make your life easy as instructor because you use X on > your daily work. (I don't use Atom!) > > # Benefits > > - Is open source. > - (Just) works in Windows, Mac and Linux. > - Easy to install in Windows, Mac and Linux. > - "All versions" are available to Windows, Mac and Linux. > > Some software, e.g. Skype, works in Windows, Mac and Linux but > different versions are available to different OS. > - Configure PATH to be accessible from Git Bash. > > No need for extra configuration or our script to fix PATH. > - Well mantained and supported. > - Syntax highlight out of the box (AFAIK). > - Lots of plugins for learners that decide to keep using Atom. > > AFAIK there is a plugin that allow learners to use Atom > to edit remote files, e.g. on clusters. > - Beautiful interface. > > # Drawback > > - Learners and instructions will need to switch windows. > > # (My own) conclusions > > Replace nano with Atom will avoid many of the our issues during the > workshop, such as "we will use nano but if you don't have nano you can > use X", and reduce the volunteer work that we need to maintain the > quality of our workshops. The price that we will need to pay is switch > windows during the workshop. > > Thanks, > Raniere > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
