In 2001, the tenth version of the Macintosh operating system was restructured from the ground up. Instead of being built on Apple’s previous operating systems, it used the open-source FreeBSD as its basis. FreeBSD, like Linux, is a fork of Unix. The ideas introduced in my previous post are topical to Unix itself and work just the same whether you’re using Mac or Linux.
I might add that I find the Atom experience be a bit of a Catch-22 situation in that it seems to anticipate a fairly technical knowledge on the part of the user to get it installed and running correctly
The ~/.git issue is not common, as far as I can tell, and it occurs because of something that already existed that the user didn’t know about until Atom freaks out a little at having so many files to track. But yes, Atom is not the sort of editor that holds people’s hands when they’re learning it.
yet at the same time it’s recommended by quite a few blogs, videos, tutorials, and such as a very good editor to use when starting to learn various types of coding, which invites folks with not much technical knowledge to get involved with Atom.
This is an issue with the authors not thinking through their recommendation fully. I happen to agree with them, but I also add a caveat every time I recommend Atom. It was great for me, but most people don’t dive in as deep as I do when learning something new.
I’m coming to Atom from a design perspective in order to learn and write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and not from a programming background, so things like learning to use the Mac Terminal
I have a general belief that every single person who uses a computer should know how to find their command line and navigate around inside it, so take everything I say as coming from someone who found that feature on their own at a very young age and has never felt any apprehension about experimenting.
But seriously, even people focused on web sites can benefit a lot from learning the command line. If you’re administering a site and can navigate CLI functions, you can do so much, can control so much. A lot of the Node ecosystem involves the command line, a number of JavaScript frameworks make use of it, and if you make use of git, it’s pretty handy to have a terminal open much of the time. I am not an expert terminal monkey. I use documentation basically every time I do things because I don’t remember the commands or what order the arguments should be in. I screw things up and I prefer GUI applications when CLI would work just fine. Next to any dedicated Linux user, I know nothing. But I can get around and know where to find out what I don’t know.
rather a lot to figure out just to get the tool (the editor) you’re going to use, to run
Remember that the problem doesn’t seem to have been of Atom’s creation. At some point, your user folder became a git repo. I have no idea when or why. Only Mac users have had this problem, and then only a handful have posted about it. I happen to know that a large number of the devs use Mac and if this were a problem for every Mac user, I doubt it would have slipped through.
For me it’s a bit uncomfortable to need to ask a question I’m pretty certain is going to bring an answer that I won’t understand because I have much less knowledge than someone trying to help me might expect.
It’s the fact that you chose Atom as an editor and were using git with a dedicated github/ folder. Your initial post doesn’t really look like it’s from someone who has never used Terminal.
