1. You teach so your experience is probably very different from us SWE/SREs who only work with other technical staff for the most part.
2. You can add cursor and mouse control to your .nanorc. I'm not sure if bash, etc have that. With that said, I have cursor enabled in my .nanorc along with a bunch of other stuff. The cursor thing.. I'm kind of confused on how you use it, but I rarely use it. It's (to me) weird. I think I just havent used it enough to really know its capabilites.
I think as a teacher it'd be super helpful to you to have a base set of dotfiles that your students just git clone when they start the class. Or even better, have them write their own and just provide them the settings you want them to enable. When I bring new SREs on board, without the base dotfiles for them to grab on day 1 it takes practically a week for someone to get setup and ready to work.
Have each of them commit their dotfiles to their own repos, probably forked from yours. That will get them familiar with github. Then try to get them to actually build out a github portfolio. I spent 6 months interviewing for a few positions last year and I was really surprised how few people had githubs with anything on them. It's not my main criteria but it's nice when someone has put effort into their gh/gitlab/etc profile and projects.
Also please teach them about filesystems. Most of the younger people (20s) I interviewed knew very little linux/containerization/filesystems.. I think the filesystem thing is from them growing up with MacOS and iPhones. They don't need to dig into anything beyond their "folders" if even that.
3. Absolutely one of my CLI annoyances here. I wrote another comment explaining why it frustrates me.
Related to your last sentence- I'd say 99% of the CLI/TUI apps I write are things that give you an easy front end (TUI and simple commands/flags) to perform backend systems tasks. So I have a ton of them as an SRE. The main reason I like to put things in a TUI and not just CLI flags is that ANYONE can hop in and use it because the options are all displayed to you front and center. You just use arrows or numbers to navigate.
I do TUI *AND* command line flags because some people want to do it quick and fast, or make aliases, etc for what they're doing. THen there's the TUI which opens if you don't run a flag, the TUI is so, so helpful to people new to the apps.
This lets me democratize the various apps I've created and let anyone who isn't me use them. It's great.
Here's one example of my TUI+CLI apps. This is super old it's much prettier now.
> I do TUI AND command line flags because some people want to do it quick and fast, or make aliases, etc for what they're doing. THen there's the TUI which opens if you don't run a flag, the TUI is so, so helpful to people new to the apps.
YES, this is the way to go! I've written a couple of internal tools that work this way and it's the best of both worlds IMO.
I’ve worked with helping beginner students set up their environments a bit. I’m skeptical of the idea of providing too much in the way of custom dotfiles or anything like that. Students will come with their own systems. Mac, or Windows, usually. So a professor or grad student who naturally uses Linux and isn’t really a software deployment expert might have trouble getting a rock-solid portable collection of scripts. It might seem like an odd difficulty for smart and technical people to have, but administrating other people’s systems is a totally different skill from research after all!
More importantly, in a class of a couple hundred, somebody will find a way to get off the happy path. No matter how well you design it. Hopefully they’ll come to a teaching assistant or something, but there’s a good chance they’ll go to YouTube or something instead. In that case, it is best if their installation is as standard as possible.
Also the filesystem problem is such a thing and you have dredged up some feelings, hahaha. In particular, I think operating systems and VSCode have gotten way too good at hiding the fact that the file somebody is editing is, in fact, still in a zip archive. Until they go to save it or run it.
2. You can add cursor and mouse control to your .nanorc. I'm not sure if bash, etc have that. With that said, I have cursor enabled in my .nanorc along with a bunch of other stuff. The cursor thing.. I'm kind of confused on how you use it, but I rarely use it. It's (to me) weird. I think I just havent used it enough to really know its capabilites.
I think as a teacher it'd be super helpful to you to have a base set of dotfiles that your students just git clone when they start the class. Or even better, have them write their own and just provide them the settings you want them to enable. When I bring new SREs on board, without the base dotfiles for them to grab on day 1 it takes practically a week for someone to get setup and ready to work.
Have each of them commit their dotfiles to their own repos, probably forked from yours. That will get them familiar with github. Then try to get them to actually build out a github portfolio. I spent 6 months interviewing for a few positions last year and I was really surprised how few people had githubs with anything on them. It's not my main criteria but it's nice when someone has put effort into their gh/gitlab/etc profile and projects.
Also please teach them about filesystems. Most of the younger people (20s) I interviewed knew very little linux/containerization/filesystems.. I think the filesystem thing is from them growing up with MacOS and iPhones. They don't need to dig into anything beyond their "folders" if even that.
3. Absolutely one of my CLI annoyances here. I wrote another comment explaining why it frustrates me.
Related to your last sentence- I'd say 99% of the CLI/TUI apps I write are things that give you an easy front end (TUI and simple commands/flags) to perform backend systems tasks. So I have a ton of them as an SRE. The main reason I like to put things in a TUI and not just CLI flags is that ANYONE can hop in and use it because the options are all displayed to you front and center. You just use arrows or numbers to navigate.
I do TUI *AND* command line flags because some people want to do it quick and fast, or make aliases, etc for what they're doing. THen there's the TUI which opens if you don't run a flag, the TUI is so, so helpful to people new to the apps.
This lets me democratize the various apps I've created and let anyone who isn't me use them. It's great.
Here's one example of my TUI+CLI apps. This is super old it's much prettier now.
https://i.imgur.com/dxXwRzD.gifv