Text editors and assignments

I was relieved that all the hands-on assignments this week went smoothly. The vim tutorial was pretty neat--old school! I've never used a pure text (no GUI) computer tutorial before; the only comparison I can draw was when I tried playing a MUD RPG as a kid a couple of times. So it was sort of fun in that respect.

The Ubuntu server configuration tweaks were, as advertised in the introduction for this week, pretty straightforward. No problems. I admit that they were one of the first things I tackled, so I didn't comprehend much of what I was actually doing at the time. But after getting through the readings, I feel like I have a better idea.

Judging from the discussion boards, everyone says that mastering the commands in the CLI is all about practice, practice, practice. That seems good in that it implies most people rely heavily on user guides and lists of commands for reference. This could be a bad comparison, but the Command Line Interface seems sort of like the AACR2 rules for cataloging library and archival materials. Not many people have all the rules memorized and you don't have to be familiar with everything to know how to catalog. You just have to be familiar with the fundamental cataloging rules and literate in consulting the AACR2 manual and its updates for detailed information on any specific situation. The materials you deal with often you will eventually memorize from practice, but not grasping everything all at once won't prevent you doing some original cataloging and there are user groups you can go to for help; to push this analogy a little further, CLI scripting performs the same function as the LC catalog, both save a lot of people a lot of redundant work.

I don't know how much of the commands in vim tutor I have retained. I remember being slightly confused with the "!" in some of the way some of the commands were presented. I didn't know if the tutorial getting excited about telling me how to exit the program at first, but I soon realized that the exclamation mark is a vital part of the command :q!