Homework

While you could use a fancy integrated development environment (IDE), we encourage you to take the time this quarter to practice using an editor native to the command line for this course. While these tools can be slow to pick up at first, being practiced with an editor of choice in the command line will take you a very far way. It’s very common you want to edit something quick on your computer and you can save lots of time by not having to start up a slow application like IntelliJ for a quick fix. Sometimes you might not have an IDE available if the files you need to edit live on a server like attu, so learning one of these editors now will be very helpful in the future.

There are two very popular command line editors, vim and emacs. A lot of people spend hours and hours arguing about which one is better which is a pretty useless waste of time. It’s okay to like whichever one you like and it’s also fine if you have no opinion! Hunter personally prefers vim and will use that in class, but use whichever one you prefer!

Additionally, many students choose to work on the weekly assignments on attu rather than downloading the VM. Using a command line editor on attu is much simpler than having to figure out how to download/upload your code to attu so that you can use a different editor on your local computer.