editors.md

Context: a class of 10 9th-12th graders doing a week-long class on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The question of an editor. While we stay in guided environments like jsbin & mistakes.io for the first two days of class, in order to save to files and tinker, we eventually need to ‘save to disk’ to view things as real websites and understand how code works.

I use vim personally, but know very well that it’s a tough place to start for students, and would be a dangerous distraction from the topics.

What really matters for an editor in this setting:

1. It should be simple to use. This means keystrokes do what they do in other programs, like Word.
2. It should not crash.
3. It should be free and easy to install on 10 iMacs in one morning.

I considered GitHub Atom for the editor, but realized that

1. It may not be free after the beta program
2. I’d have to distribute a bootlegged .zip file
3. A friend or two on twitter has seen it crash often.

Thus I went for the other default, Sublime Text. This has a few drawbacks that show up in class:

1. The strategy of editing, then saving, then clicking on the browser and hitting command-r, is slow and error-prone.
2. The Sublime Text nag menu on Save is disruptive and annoying.
3. The 'tabs + sidebar' navigation of Sublime that was always a little annoying for me is really annoying for students. Disappearing tabs are poorly communicated by the interface, and tabs don't convey the difference between files with the same name in different folders.

—

I considered but didn’t use TextWrangler, which would probably be a better ‘simple’ option, and brackets, which is a little shiny and untested, but has the huge benefit of ‘live editing mode’.

On that topic: I set up the basic

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

on each computer, but this is more or less magic to the kids and they certainly wouldn’t be able to do this at home. I couldn’t find another server for OSX that was free & simple. Even just a wrapper for this might be great.

More than a little late for this particular need, but go makes it super easy to build fileservers like this. Here's one for future reference.

Once you have built it for a particular arch, you can easily share the executable (no need to rebuild or have go on each machine. I just haven't built already for OSX (no access to that).