Hi Raniere, Thanks for bringing this up. I think it is always good to re-examine our options as the field is constantly changing. I agree that Nano isn’t ideal and its always disappointing to tell students we’re going to use it for the workshop and they will likely never use it again. My big goal is to have students on all platforms do the same thing when I’m teaching - so that what I demonstrate applies to everyone. I’m not familiar with some of the terminology in your pro/con list, so apologies if you covered this:
during the git lesson, can students set the editor to atom or does some pre-configuration need to happen? If there is configuration, is that something we can easily put in the installation instructions? can I open it from the command line (without setting something in my bash profile)? I don’t want each platform to launch it differently. I also worry about the overhead with the initial save - making sure everyone uses the same name so they can continue to type what you are typing for the remainder of the lesson. Having to switch between windows is a very big con to me, and I’m with Noam (and others) in that I’d like to know that it isn’t going to be too much of a cognitive load for students. My experience, even with Nano, is that there is so much that is brand new when learning git, that people often get lost between changing text in the editor, saving, then committing with a commit message and I fear that changing windows will make this even worse. -Azalee > On Mar 30, 2017, at 2:58 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
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