Hey everybody, Yesterday, I started exploring version control & backup of my dotfiles using git & github. I then went on to share that with my colleagues, who have much less experience than I do at the command line. One of them liked it; she stated that the colours made it easier to distinguish between her local and ssh terminals. She also seemed to (admittedly briefly) get the git workflow because of this interaction; I have not followed up on this.
(this is my new Mac bash terminal after modding) https://www.dropbox.com/s/12dyrrrfce6gx46/Screenshot%202016-05-03%2011.12.04.png?dl=0 (my dotfiles) github.com/ericmjl/dotfiles It suddenly occurred to me that customizing one's own command prompt with colours could be a fun activity to reinforce the git lesson concepts (forking, add-commit-push) and bash lesson concepts (environment variables, hierarchical directory structure). I thought it might work like this: After explaining the structure of the dotfile, including the $PATH variables, and other shortcut variables (e.g. I have a $github variable that sends me directly to the directory housing all of my github projects) that can be declared, the instructor shows his/her own git repository with his/her own dotfiles, and then has the class fork it and customize it to their own needs, and push it back up to Github. I thought it might be a good idea because of the following reasons: 1. It's fun stuff! Colours make people happy! 2. Customization = ownership over your own computing environment. 3. It's a practical, hands-on thing to do that has immediate results that can be viewed on the screen. 4. If the participant is using more than just one computer (e.g. accessing a compute cluster), it is a great way for them to start cloning their compute environment (if they so choose to). What are people's thoughts on this? Cheers, Eric
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