I would also encourage the move to Atom as the default editor. I believe
that Atom offers benefits that nano, while simple, does not offer.
Installation of Atom is very stable. It works out of the box with no
additional configuration. It's "an editor that will be welcoming to an
elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also
a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers." [1]
The 3 minute "Getting Started" video highlights the simplicity of Atom's
usage while leaving the door open to future extensibility by the user.
[2] The documentation is excellent, particularly the "Atom Basics" page,
which can be viewed in Linux, macOS, or Windows [3]
Unlike nano, Atom was designed for people familiar with web browsing,
and it could be argued that nano while seeming simple to some is more
difficult to those that have grown up using the web browser daily.
Having taught many students in different workshops, Atom just works. It
takes minutes to install and students have no difficulty using it. I
haven't seen students have difficulty opening a file or navigating
directories.
As an instructor, while I am ok using nano, I would welcome using Atom.
Carol
[1] http://flight-manual.atom.io/getting-started/sections/why-atom/
[2] https://atom.io/docs
[3]
http://flight-manual.atom.io/getting-started/sections/atom-basics/#platform-mac
--
Carol Willing
Research Software Engineer, Project Jupyter
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Director, Python Software Foundation
Strengths: Empathy, Relator, Ideation, Strategic, Learner
Mark Laufersweiler wrote:
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
lauf...@gmail.com <mailto:lauf...@gmail.com>
Bad weather looks best through an open window.
On Mar 30, at 4:58 AM, Raniere Silva <rani...@rgaiacs.com
<mailto:rani...@rgaiacs.com>> 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
Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org
<mailto:Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org>
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
