Hi Azalee,
Django Girls (Python/Django) and Railsbridge (Ruby/Rails) which are both
1.5 day workshops to teach beginners to develop a full stack web
application use Atom as their preferred editor. Both are run often and
students have no difficulty using Atom.
As to your questions:
* setting up the editor in the git lesson has a one line command
whether using Atom or Nano
[https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/02-setup/] (both are
covered in this document).
* Atom can easily be opened from the command line using simply `atom`
or `atom <filename>`
* Atom actually provides a nicer git experience since you can use
command line or use git within Atom
(http://flight-manual.atom.io/using-atom/sections/version-control-in-atom/#open-on-github)
One other benefit to using Atom is you can use Hydrogen and create and
execute notebooks from within Atom. While this is not a Software
Carpentry emphasis today, it's helpful to know that this flexibility
exists within Atom.
While the near term may not see a move to Atom, I do think that over
time the students will be better served by a more modern text editor
than nano. As an instructor, I can see the desire to use what is
familiar, and that is an important consideration.
Carol
Azalee Bostroem wrote:
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]
<mailto:[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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