Hi,
The original motivation for the choice of Atom was:
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.
This is indeed the case with nano. The quick fix is to use two shell
windows, one with the editor and one with the prompt (a common mode of
working with multiple shell windows anyway). Learners and instructions
will need to switch windows, but this was listed as an issue with Atom
as well.
I'd stick with nano for the reasons suggested below, until some
research has been done to show that Atom will not get in the way of
the attendees learning experiences. Otherwise there's a risk that SWC
goes chasing after the latest shiny tools before their value has been
proven.
cheers,
mike
ting Henry Neeman <[email protected]> on Thu, 30 Mar 2017 10:58:12 -0500 (CDT):
Without being able to speak to most of the
issues being discussed in this thread, I
second what Mark says in his first paragraph.
I've been teaching a Programming for Non-majors
course at my (and Mark's) institution for
17 years, and we've always used nano (or pico,
nano's predecessor).
The reason is, just as Mark says, it's very
quick to learn -- usually they can learn it
in 5 to 10 minutes, well enough to get their
work done.
---
Henry Neeman ([email protected])
Assistant Vice President, Information Technology - Research Strategy Advisor
Director, OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER)
Associate Professor, Gallogly College of Engineering
Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Computer Science
The University of Oklahoma
One Partners Place Suite 2600, 350 David L. Boren Blvd., Norman OK 73019
405-325-5386 (office), 405-325-7181 (fax), 405-245-3823 (cell),
[email protected] (to e-mail me a text message)
http://www.oscer.ou.edu/
----------
On Thu, 30 Mar 2017, 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
[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
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Dr. Michael (Mike) Jackson [email protected]
Software Architect Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5141
EPCC, The University of Edinburgh http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Software Sustainability Institute http://www.software.ac.uk
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