If nobody has told you, it's not obvious that the tab key autocompletes on the command line... or even how to get there.
Most people's experience of computing today is through user interfaces that — for convenience — conceal a lot of the underlying tech. It's possible to be using sophisticated apps on tablets today without ever interacting with a file system.
So this is a collection of "superbasics" for students to discover some of the the really low-level things nobody told them about.
- learn shortcuts!
- use tab completion!
- never put spaces in your filenames!
:-)
And yes I've seen CompSci professors on Macs bouncing on the left-arrow key because they didn't know about the Alt-click position-on-command-line trick in Terminal ;-)
This Jekyll website came about in response to beginner computer science students arriving with little or no experience of using their computers on a system level. Some come to college already having hacked their own distro of Ubuntu, but others might never typed a command in their lives. That's OK: you didn't need to. Until now.
Specifically, using browser-based learning means some competent autodidacts have learned to program entirely on the web (I'm looking at you codeskulptor). Nothing wrong with this — on the contrary, it's amazing — but it means assumptions colleges make about students' tech exposure are much less reliable than they used to be.
See DEVELOPMENT.md if you're going to be doing any work — there's a gotcha on the way the topics and pages are ordered.
The site uses Jekyll's containers to manage a collection of topic-pages that are previous-next linked together.
See _config.yml's collections — if you add a new page, add it to the
order in there: the navigation links are constructed from those.
Add new topics to the topics collection.
The CSS was originally based on the block-log theme by Anandu B Ajith and the responsive hamburger is implemented using the label-of-hidden-checkbox CSS-only trick inspired by Code Boxx'a css-ham-menu.
Work-in-Progress for 2020 — RHUL