Unit 3 Class Assignment: Text editors a hands-on experience

This week our class got a real hands-on trial working in the Linux terminal. To be honest I felt a bit lost at first. I've certainly had to unlearn what I have learned, step back and remember the good old days prior to having the graphic user interface crutch. I've also had to get use to not using a mouse to do almost everything. This was a first scary and wonderful step (at least for me) in to a world of much more control and responsibility.

The readings were not as numerous as before but they were still thick in detail and loaded with info. I wish we actually had an additional week just to go back and re-read everything from the past 3 weeks. Some of the information kind of blends together and when your dealing with commands you've got to keep them straight. Fortunately our instructions and tutorials are very clear and once I familiarized I was ready to go.

There were a number of commands we were asked to run this time around including downloading files ($ sudo aptitude install vim-runtime) which worked great, running programs (vimtutor) which didn't work so well but later after some guidance I was able to get a similar one to work (vim tutor), and we even did some configuring via nano where we made .bashrc alias the "ls" command so it would always show hidden files. That worked great.

Additionally I ran some connectivity tests by using a simple ping command and got the IP address of our VM server (ifconfig).

I found the VIM text editor to be fairly easy to work with and quick to understand. Although I had some technical issues at first, I was able to follow along and complete all of the tasks. The main hurdle was just realizing I was not in the actual command line anymore. The VIM commands make a lot of sense and I agreed with the the tutorials suggestion of using the H-L keys to navigate the screen. Once you get that down you actually can zip around quite quickly.

We were also asked to think about how we have done configurations in the past on our computers compared to configuring Linux files this week. I've almost entirely worked on a Mac at home so I've never really "configured" it at least in the way we did via the nano and vi text editors in Linux. So I can't say this is different than what I have done before since it really feels like a whole new ball game. But perhaps I've been "configuring" all along and just didn't realize it.

I certainly have created/changed folders (or directories) and files in the past by right-click selecting them and using key commands to create folders via the Mac Finder which is almost identical in function to a Windows Explorer window. I have also downloaded clients in the past to do batch name changes. This seems like something that I would be able to do just as well if I knew how in a shell. I just have to get those commands down.