I'm old. So I still remember when every computer screen looked like what we now call "the command line." Screens were black and text was green or amber. Anything you needed to do on the computer took forever and depended on your ability to remember lots of commands and type them correctly. This made computing seem difficult and unapproachable. So when the first MacIntosh computers showed up in the Art Department where I was studying, I was as happy as anyone.
Finally, it was (more or less) obvious how the computer was organized, and figuring out how to do things and what you could do was easy and intuitive. When I first used a Windows 3.1 computer, I was even more delighted. And so I have been a relatively happy camper for many years. Of course there have been difficulties and frustrations, but by and large if there was any task worth doing someone had built an interface that made it easy to do things without having to remember tedious commands and type them accurately. This allowed me to reserve my head space for the problems that actually interested me and/or I had been hired to solve.
I recently started learning AngularJS, and I was dismayed to find that before you can even start with Angular, you have to do a fair amount of work in the command line. Not only that, but there's little explanation of why you need to do these steps and no explanation of whether there are alternate routes to accomplish the same thing. I get that when you're trying to write a tutorial if you try to cover every last bit of background information someone might want to know that you'd never get finished.
However, the absence of such supporting information right now means that if you want to learn AngularJS (and I suspect many other current JavaScript frameworks) you're stuck using the command line whether you like it or not. You may not be surprised to learn that I don't especially like it. I've learned a few things over the past couple of months that make me dislike it a lot less. So if you share my dislike of the command line, keep reading and maybe we can make life a little easier.
Why we need the command line
As my elementary school teachers could tell you, I've never been especially fond of just doing things without knowing why. So let's start with why it is that it seems everything needs to go through the command line. The answer is simple (but seldom articulated): nodejs. Node was designed as a server-side technology, so the only facility it has for drawing to the screen is a browser that's pointed to a site that it's serving. However, most of the tools you use during JS development aren't conceived that way and I have no idea if they could be.
You get a few things from node that nearly make its lack of a decent UI worth it.
- Node lets you run a webserver (or several) out of any directory on your computer. Unlike more traditional web servers such as IIS or Apache, Node lets you just fire up a server anywhere. Security considerations aside, it's pretty cool that you're now free to put your code in whatever directory makes sense for development rather than the directory that the web server can see (or that you've set up as a virtual directory). You can even have one server running the site and another server running the unit tests.
- Node Package Manager (npm). Npm is like a magic registry in the sky that will allow you to more or less instantly download and install most tools and libraries you'll need for doing Javascript development. It will also make sure that if those tools have dependencies that the libraries they depend on are also installed, even if the different tools depend on different versions of the same library.
- Many of the tools are also in node or at least depend on it/run on top of it. For example, Karma test runner launches a node server on its own port to run the tests.
So we kind of have to use it, or at least get enough benefit from it that we can grit our teeth and use the command line. I had several pain points that were driving me flat up the wall, so I'd like to share some solutions that made things easier for me.
Navigating to directories
Directories to me are only significant as a way to keep things organized and insofar as they affect whether my code runs properly or not. It's not even on my radar to be interested in constantly typing (correctly, no less) CD and the full path to the directory where my code lives. So yes, I know from a stint doing embedded development on a Linux device a few years ago that to some extent you can get the CLI to type paths for you by typing the first letter or two of each directory and pressing the tab key. But that's only slightly less tedious. After several days of this, I got really annoyed and went searching.
What I found is that on Windows you can hold down the shift key while right-clicking on a folder. This adds "Open a command prompt here" to the context menu. Note that this is in a different spot on the context menu depending if you right-click on the left pane (shown) or the right pane.
Mac/Linux people, I am sure Google can tell you similar shortcuts for your environment. The point is you don't have to type the path over and over.
Typing the same crap over and over
If I enjoyed typing the same crap over and over, I probably wouldn't have decided to be a programmer. But as I got into the red-green rhythm of testing, I found myself typing karma start (red), karma start (green), cls (if the test passed, clear the screen and on to the next test).
Again, my vague memories came to the rescue and I remembered that you can use your up and down arrow keys to rerun the same commands again. So, once I'd typed karma start once, I could run it again by pressing the up arrow key once and pressing Enter. Then, after typing cls, two up arrows goes back past cls to karma start. From there, one up arrow goes to karma start again, or a down arrow goes to cls.
Yes, Mac users, I know that you use a different command to clear your screen, but I don't know it off the top of my head. Usually I run bootcamp on any Mac I use. But the idea is the same.
Not being able to read the text
Like I said, I'm old. I also enjoy sparring in karate, so my glasses may not sit exactly where they're supposed to on my head. So the red karma uses for a failed test is completely illegible to me on the default black background. Karma has about four colors I have seen:
- Medium gray for ordinary text
- Green for passing test
- Red for failing test
- Teal for console.log
I vaguely think I remember seeing yellow, but I don't remember what they were doing with it.
All this variability means that it can be tough to find a background color that works. Let's not talk text colors, because node and karma change them anyway. In karma, you have the choice of "use colors" or "don't use colors," but there is no "use better colors." Anyway, my experience is that a white background gives the best legibility across the most frequently-used colors. It's a shame, because it seems that "real developers" use darker color schemes, but there you have it.
One problem with setting the background color is that any time you run npm install, node will helpfully change your background color to black. I haven't found any way to get it to stop doing this, but if you set your defaults, you can just close the window and reopen it using the right-click menu described above. To set the defaults, just click the icon in the upper left of the command prompt and select "Defaults."
Future plans
For those wondering why I launch karma over and over rather than just leaving it running, I'm planning an entire post on karma setup in the future.
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