[Discuss] what's the best working process to teach new users?

[vickytnz]

As someone who's been getting non-Git people into the prototyping kit, I've found the instructions on what to use to get started are a bit dev-heavy. I'd suggest changing them for non-devs:

• Github Desktop for managing git. It's visual and does all the authentication stuff. You do need to remember to sync a branch before merging (and it doesn't really work offline, but never mind). My colleagues and I still use the command line for pushing to heroku, but it means it's just one line that they can copy-paste rather than loads.
• Atom for code editing. Sublime is cool, but it's not free, and Atom is. As it's also from Github is also shows visually if you've worked on a page. It is a little more laggy than Atom, but I haven't had serious issues with it for prototyping.

My team have managed to pick it up really quickly, so I suspect others could too.

[gavinwye]

If you are using public Github you can set up Heroku to automatically pull
from a specific git branch whenever you commit. This means you can forget
about pushing to Heroku in your workflow.

[joelanman]

Would you be able to contribute docs on those? I don't think any of us here use them

[edwardhorsford]

I guess one aim of the current guidance is to present a clear and consistent set of docs that users can generally follow. I think it's easier to explain if we just have one main way of doing things. In prototype training, it's also helpful for everyone to be using the same thing.

That's not to say our current choices are correct though! I wonder if this should be split in to two issues: one for github desktop, and one for atom. We can then have discussions on each?

[gavinwye]

@edwardhorsford I think this would benefit from being separated out into two different subjects.

A thought on the Github desktop client.

This is all a means to an end. People should be concentrating on designing/building prototypes not learning new things.
Learning Git, Terminal, and other things is a daunting task. Using something like the Github desktop client introduces you to Git in a visual way that makes it easy to learn. I learned Git that way it also makes it easy to figure out some of the more advanced Git/Github concepts like branching, merging, and pull requests.
There is a layer of abstraction, but you can always go back and learn some of the complicated things that you can do via the command line once you understand the concepts.
Now I'm more of an advanced user I don't find the Github client that helpful and have progressed on to Git Tower. Unless I'd started there, I wouldn't know how to do the things I do like branching, tagging, pull requests without it. Come to think of it I'm not sure I know how to branch in from the command line.

A thought on Atom

I've been using Atom since it was in beta, I'm an early adopter and jumped from Sublime Text primarily because it was new shiny and free. I still use Sublime for the things that I can't to in Atom. I think Sublime Text has better text manipulation capabilities.
Atom does require a lot of customisation out of the box. Some people may find that daunting. As a basic setup, I'd recommend just installing Emmet, Git blame, and Minimap

I think the fact that both of these tools are free is also a good thing.

[bfk]

I was just going to submit a simple pull request to change the docs to suggest atom rather than SublimeText -- the text editor is the only non-free software (in both money and F/LOSS senses) that's linked to or recommended. Given the GDS principles on F/LOSS, I'd suggest that we not point people toward software they have to pay for, which raises another adoption barrier.

I just followed the newbie guide using a newly-downloaded version from atom.io and didn't have any problems -- not sure I'd agree that it needs much in the way of configuration. Let me know if you want the simple PR - it's just a trivial link change.

[edwardhorsford]

Would be interested in others' views. FWIW you don't have to pay for it, though it does nag you.

I think the reason we originally chose Sublime is because that's what the majority of people at GDS use and are familiar with. It's helpful when we teach the kit for people to be using the same thing. If most people are moving to Atom though, then we should consider it.

[bfk]

Well, non-free software is non-free, whether there's an extended trial or not. There are certainly a lot of GDS Sublime fans (including me!), but I've been getting more atom recommendations lately, and I don't think that we should push our users toward non-free software unless we clearly think it's technically superior.

[joelanman]

I've switched to Atom and I think its better all round - eg much easier package installation interface.

However this bug has been open for ages and is really weird:

atom/atom#5473

on balance though I think Atom is the better recommendation

[joelanman]

Closing this for now.

We changed the text editor recommendation to Atom: #430

Still open to looking at other ways of managing Git, or even avoiding Git altogether (deploy from Dropbox for example). If anyone has good experience of alternative tools, feel free to open another issue or PR.