Front End Engineering, May 2015

Optional Setup


Pinboard

You will receive a ridiculous number of URLs during the course, so you may want to sign up for a bookmark application. Personally, I use http://pinboard.in, though it is not free. It allows you to tag, annotate, and organize all your bookmarks and I have found it to be very useful.

Instapaper

Another application you may find handy is http://instapaper.com. It is a "read later" service, of which there are many. It is a great way to keep track of reading and sync articles to your phone to read on the go.

Window Manager

A window manager allows you to move around and organize your windows without using a mouse. There is an open source window manager called Spectacle that you can read about at https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle and install using brew cask install spectacle

Configuration

Change Caps Lock to Control

Many keyboard shortcuts in Atom, Chrome, etc. require the use of the Control key. However, the Control key is a little bit difficult to reach, so many developers remap their Caps Lock and Control keys. Try this for a while and see if you can get used to it.

  1. Go to  -> System Preferences -> Keyboard
  2. Click on "Modifier Keys..."
  3. Change "Caps Lock (⇪) Key" to "^ Control"
  4. Change "Control (^) Key" to "⇪ Caps Lock"

P.S. If you decide not to do this, and ask me for help where I have to type on your computer, I will probably accidentally type A BUNCH OF UPPERCASE STUFF because I'll forget that Caps Lock isn't switched.

oh-my-zsh

This will change the default shell for your Terminal.app. This is a pretty advanced piece of software, so feel free to dig into the documentation if you feel up to it. For our purposes, though, this will automatically show you some information about git like the current branch, so if you just type the line below into Terminal.app, it will give you a nicer looking command line.

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh