UNIT 3
Well, in this unit I learned about vi and nano. I prefer nano out of the two, because I am not the world's most organized mind. vi's separate modalities were a source of frustration, but only almost as frustrating as the number of articles and websites saying "Now this part of starting up Ubuntu server will be utterly confusing and frustrating for the novice user." I would like that kind of language only if it "prepended" a good metaphor for how remember how to do the task in question, one featuring cute bunnies or traveling salesmen would be nice. Anyhow, I am told that vi can be referred to as nano without the training wheels.
So, there is a command mode and an insert mode in vi and clearly I wasn't always onboard as to which of those two modes it was currently in when I started typing text or when I wanted to either write something up or make vi do something like insert text. But I did find out that "dd" and "dy" are good friends for people who are lousy at remembering which mode they were in. Those two command are "delete character" and "delete whole word" in vi and they got rid of a lot of "I's" and "a's" which came up when I was in edit mode while thinking I was still in command mode and needed to type in the commands for "insert" and "insert right here."
Oh yeah, another priceless lesson (I should have learned last unit) is the sudo addition to commands that sometimes were not working otherwise.
I don't think I've ever done any kind of configuration before on this iMac. I think I set up devices on an old parallel port on the Dells we used at that mapping software company about 14 years ago, but I was given a printout of what I was supposed to do each step of the way, the hardest thing I recall being how to figure out a number or address for the scanner in question. That, of course required knowing which devices already attached to my computer had which addresses already. Thank goodness for the rise of USBs! Yes, there was a time that each time you added a new peripheral or device to your machine, you needed to have a disk to mount the device driver, which would explain that whole systemfile directory called "dev." Also note some of the crazy antiquated devices that are still supported by Linux, like SCSIs, tape drives, floppies et cetera.
Getting back to text editors, I remember using Notepad and Text Edit, specifically for writing html 4 code and then you could just drop into BBEdit, update the file and refresh my browser to make instant updates on web pages I was doing back before Dreamweaver made all of that seem like a waste of time. All of this I am speaking of took place in the late, late tail end of the 20th century. I initially did not see the value of unformatted text files and the very long lines of text they created, but I'm sure InDesign probably saves text that is being shoehorned into the user defined dimensions text boxes in a similar manner. It's just that the textbox objects are courteous enough to let you know if some of the text is outside the little window the user has created, a nicety that text editors do not extend to users and probably never will, considering that they do not serve the same purpose a text box in InDesign does.
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