Well, I promised I would review Command Line Power User the other day when I did the Mastering Markdown video, so here it is. This is probably a better video series to give me an opinion of his teaching skills, since it isn’t something I know entirely and is actually a little over an hour of video. Each video is longer also, so it probably won’t annoy me so much when the video player scrolls down to where I can’t see the video after switching files.
The first video is seven minutes of basics that are really basic. He advised it was skippable, and I should have taken his advice. He recommends installing iTerm 2 in OS X, which is what I use already on my Macbook. He recommends cygwin for Windows, but I tend to prefer babun on Windows. I’m watching these on the Macbook anyway. He recommends installing zshell and oh-my-zsh, which I already use and enjoy. So we’re about to where I learn some stuff.
The fifth video is about colors. It has some annoying flicking going on.
Fortunately that went away. I was wrong about when I would learn something.
He’s just focusing on how to edit your zshrc in video six. Ooo, in video
seven I learned you can CMD+click links in terminal to open them in browser;
that’s new. Being able to use take to make a directory and create it at
the same time is new to me also. Next video is covering command history,
which is a pretty standard zshell feature. At least it’s short.
Video nine is about zsh plugins. I never remember to use my plugins often
enough, but I have a lot enabled. I didn’t like most of the plugins he
showed off, but it’s useful to get people thinking about looking at the
plugins to find something they’ll find useful. It reminds me to lookup
commands of some of the ones I have installed. Video ten is about z,
which is unrelated to zshell and completely new to me. It’s pretty cool.
It tracks frequently and recently used directories and lets you switch to
them via z regex where regex is a partial match for the directory name.
It will switch across multiple directories with the one command easily.
I see from the video that I could’ve installed it via homebrew rather than
by hand, but it’s already installed manually now. It has some handy options
that are covered in the manpage. The final tip is about trash, which
is like rm, but it puts what is deleted in your Trash. I think I’m
accustomed enough to rm not to worry about that, but those might be words
I regret someday.
Overall, I think there was a lot of useful stuff if you aren’t already familiar with zshell and oh-my-zsh. It was a little long for the little bit that I got out of it, but I picked up a couple of useful tips. Overall, his teaching style is reasonable. I didn’t feel like falling asleep during either of his videos, and he doesn’t come off like he’s just directly reading from notes or anything. I might try the JavaScript 30 series when I’m in the mood to code some JS, since it’s free also. It should be a bit more substantial. Hopefully it doesn’t start out as slow.