Yesterday I spoke to Cedric about where I want to be and we came up with a plan of the things that I should learn to get there. Cedric wrote a document to overview all the steps we would take.

The first thing is the review the Command Line and learn Vim. If you are learning how to use your terminal a great place to start is using Codecademy’s new course Learn The Command Line. It is something that I had learnt before but forgotten many commands that I don’t use often, and also learnt some new, really useful commands!

For instance the command wc outputs numbers of lines, words and characters in a file. grep can be used to search a file for lines that match a particular input and returns them. You can make this match case-insensitive with grep -i. I was really buzzed to think that I could carry out all these commands, editing files and such, without leaving the command line. It will improve my efficiency so much!

And that is also why Vim is exciting. The ability to open multiple files in your terminal to edit them and run tests will be indispensable, and to navigate and edit them solely using a keyboard is quite something! It is taking me a little while to get used to, but it is a skill that will become natural with more use. I need to really resist the urge to use the arrow keys and stick to the qwerty keyboard… Such an urge though…

Your terminal comes with its own Vim tutorial after it has been downloaded. Type vimtutorinto the command line to get started.

I have been writing notes on paper on the new things that I am learning so far. One would argue that hand-writing is a bit counter intuitive when I should be using a keyboard. But I have always personally found note-writing to be a good exercise for letting information sink in. It seems to me that the time it takes to write the words helps me to comprehend the information, and saying it aloud is even better! Talking about code is really something that I must practise a lot, as I find that even if I understand a concept, as soon as I open my mouth I seem like the world’s-biggest-silly-person.