Class 2 - The Coder’s Computer

Choosing a Text Editor

Choosing a text editor is ver important when one is coding. It doesn’t matter which one, as they are all basically the same. But, find one that is best for your use. As long as the text editor you choose will help you complete a web site successfully.

What is a Text Editor?

Some features that one should look for in a text editor are:

  1. code completion
  2. syntax highlighting
  3. a nice variety of themes (to reduce eye strain and fatigue
  4. the ability to choose from a healthy selection of extensions available when you need them

Code completion and Emmet are two valueable tools to look for in text editing. They both save time and allow you to type code faster. Code completion will give you automatic suggestions to your code as you are typing and Emmet is a type of shorthand language.

Syntax highlighting is a great feature that takes the text you type, and makes it more noticeable by colorizing the text. This allows you to look for an error much more simply.

The variety of themes help you customize background colors and font colors to your liking. Typically web developers use a dark background and brightly colored text, as this is easier on the eyes.

As you progress through your career in web developing, you will want a text editor that will grow with you. You can do this with extensions, which act like plugins for your text editors. This will aide you in writing code with ease.

Text Editors are Already Available on your Computer

That’s right, on Mac computers, you will come across “Text Edit”. On Windows, it’s “Notepad”. However, on Linux computers, each distribution will come with it’s own text editor already installed depending on the distribution. Each of these come with it’s own name.

When using the text editors that come on your computer, there are no extras or plugins you can use. In fact, the text editor should be bare bones. This means no buttons to make bold or italicize either.

Third-Party Options

There are a bunch of text editor options to choose from that are changing and evolving even as we speak. It’s typical to be on one for a while and then to hear about another text editor that has new and exciting features that you would want to try out. And thus, the cycle repeats when you jump from one to another throughout your career. Check out the best text editors for mac here.

Text Editors vs. IDEs

A text editor is exactly what the title says, it edit’s text. However, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an array of different software in one place. It’s a text editor, a file manager, a compiler, and a debugger in one software package.

‘The Command Line!’ Notes

It is typical for one to have several terminals open at a time. For example, you can have a terminal open to the below at the same time:

  1. currently working on
  2. bring up ancilliary data
  3. viewing Manual pages

A command line, or terminal, is a text based interface to the system. You can type in commands and feedback will be given to you.

Shortcuts

When entering commands, there are stored in a history. You can revisit these past commands by using the up and down arrow keys. No need to re-type out commands, just hit the up arrow a few times. You can edit these commands using the left and right arrow keys as well.

Basic Navigation

Command pwd stands for Print Working Directory. The command does just that. It tells you what your current or present working directory is.

Use pwd when you lose track of where you are at.

Command ls will show you what’s in there. It stands for list.

ls[options][locations]

The square brackets above reflect optional items. The terminal can be ran with or without them.

ls -l: indicates grabbing a long listing. A long listing has the following:

ls etc: tells ls not to list our current directory but instead to list that directories contents ls -l /etc: running ls with both a comman line option and argument. It shows a long listing of the directory /etc.

Paths

There are 2 types o fpaths we can use, absolute and relative. Wheneer we refer to a file or directory we are using one of these paths. Whenever we refer to a file or directory, we can, in fact, use either type of path (either way, the system will still be directed to the same location).

Absolute Paths specify a location in relation to the root directory, that can be identified by the forward slash(/).

Relative Paths specify a location in relation to where we currently are in the system, no slash.

~(tilde) - Is a shortcur for your home directory. eg:

Shortcut

If you run the command cd without any arguments then it will always take you back to your home directory.

More About Files

EVERYTHING is a file.

Linix is Case Sensitive

Spaces in file names do not work. If there are spaces, you must use quotes or use escape characters.

Shortcut

In the previous section we learnt about something called Tab Completion. If you use that before encountering the space in the directory name then the terminal will automatically escape any spaces in the name for you.

You can make a hidden file by adding a . in front of the file name. There’s no special command or action to make a file hidden.

When searching for the hidden file ls will not find it. You will need to put in ls -a, so that it will show hidden files and directories.

SUM IT UP

file
obtain information about what type of file a file or directory is.

ls -a
List the contents of a directory, including hidden files.

Everything is a file under Linux
Even Directories.

Linux is an extensionless system
Files can have any extension they like or none at all.

Linux is case sensitive
Beware of silly typos.

Manual Pages

Manual Pages are a set o fpages that explain every command available on your system including what they do, the specifics of how you run them and what command line arguments they accept. To run it type the below:

man

To exit the man pages, press’q’ for quit.

Type the below to do a keyword search on the Manual Pages

man -k

Sum it up

man
Look up the manual page for a particular command.

man -k
Do a keyword search for all manual pages containing the given search term.

**/**
Within a manual page, perform a search for 'term'

n
After performing a search within a manual page, selct the next found item.

Use the man pages so you can easily look stuff up.

File Manipulation

mkdir
Make Directory - ie. Create a directory.

rmdir
Remove Directory - ie. Delete a directory.

touch
Create a blank file.

cp
Copy - ie. Copy a file or directory.

mv
Move - ie. Move a file or directory (can also be used to rename).

rm
Remove - ie. Delete a file.

No Undo
The Linux command line does not have an undo feature. Perform destructive actions carefully.

Command line options
Most commands have many useful command line options. Make sure you skim the man page for new commands so you are familiar with what they can do and what is available.

Vi Text Editor

vi
Edit a file.

cat
View a file.

less
Convenient for viewing large files.

Permissions

chmod
Change permissions on a file or directory.

ls -ld
View the permissions for a specific directory.

Filters

head
View the first n lines of data.

tail
View the last n lines of data.

sort
Organise the data into order.

nl
Print line numbers before data.

wc
Print a count of lines, words and characters.

cut
Cut the data into fields and only display the specified fields.

sed
Do a search and replace on the data.

uniq
Remove duplicate lines

tac
Print the data in reverse order.

Processing
Filters allow us to process and format data in interesting ways.

man pages
Most of the programs we looked at have command line options that allow you to modify their behaviour.

egrep
View lines of data which match a particular pattern.

Regular Expressions
A powerful way to identify particular pieces of information.

Piping and Redirection

>
Save output to a file.

»
Append output to a file.

<
Read input from a file.

2>
Redirect error messages.

** **
Send the output from one program as input to another program.

Streams
Every program you may run on the command line has 3 streeams, STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR.

Process Management

top
View real-time data about processes running on the system

ps
Get a listing of processes runnning on the system.

kill
End the running of a process.

jobs
Display a list of current jobs running in the background.

fg
Move a background process into the foreground.

ctrl + z
Pause the current foreground process and move it into the background.

Control
We have quite a bit of control over the running of our programs.

Bash Scripting

#!
Shebang. Indicates which interpreter a script should be run with.

echo
Print a message to the screen.

which
Tells you the path to a particular program.

$
Placed before a variable name when we are referring to it’s value.

``
Backticks. Used to save the output of a program into a variable.

date </br> Prints the date.

if[] then else fi
Perform basic conditional logic

Behaves the same
Anything you may do on the command line you may do in a script and it will behave exactly the same.

Formatting
Bash scripts are particularly picky when it comes to formatting. Make sure spaces are put where they are needed an not put when they are not needed.

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