Reading Notes 02
Read: Choosing a Text Editor
In this reading, the author of the article, offered up good advice on how to choose a text editor. He spoke of the basic editors that come with anyones’ operating system such as Text Edit or Notepad. In these text editors, there are no special features. They do not help with syntax highlightinga nd code completion. Neither do they provide the user with themes or useful extensions.
A list of text editors used in the developer world today are:
- VS Code
- Atom
- Sublime Text
- Notepad++
- BB Edit
These text editors come with helpful features and extensions.
I have personally used Sublime Text in the past and grew fond of it before being introduced to VS Code. My personal preferences are to these two editors.
Read Carefully:
The Command Line
A command prompt or terminal is a window only cosisting of text that allows you to navigate your computer without using a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The basic layout of a terminal starts with a prompt, then command, and finally command line arguments. The terminal will return an output followed by another prompt.
The Bash Shell
There are various shells available and the most common shell is called Bash (Bourne again shell). The way to check which shell you are using is to use the command echo. This command will output the current shell you are using in the terminal.
Basic Navigation
This section provides some basic commands for movement around and examination of the terminal. For example:
- ls
- ls -l
- pwd
- cd (.., /, ../)
More About Files
This section denotes important information about linux based systems and their behavior. For example, everything in linux (from your files to montior) is treated as file!
It is important to remember that a space in the terminal is usually denoting the seperation of an item. You can search for a file with a space in the name but it will show up as an error. There are two ways of moving around this fact. These are, surrounding the file name with quotation marks (‘’) or using an escape character ().