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Preparing your tools

Tom Swirly edited this page Jun 19, 2013 · 1 revision

The terminal.

echomesh is a command line program and as such you'll be running it from the command line - a program called "terminal" on the Macintosh and Linux, and the Command Line program on Windows. Your very first stage in working with echomesh should always be to open a terminal window.

In the examples below, a line starting with $ means you should type that line into the terminal and press return (without the $ of course), and lines without the $ show the sort of output you should be expecting. [...] means "lots of dull stuff omitted".

$ ls echomesh
asset  cache  code  command  documentation  LICENSE  log  README.md
$ ls /tmp
[...]

Choosing a text editor.

Before you start, you are going to need to choose a text editor. Scores are text files and you're going to edit them - programs like Microsoft Word don't do a good job at this because they throw in formatting characters.

Any text editor will do!

We personally suggest the free, open-source software emacs because it's extremely powerful and reasonably intuitive - BUT be aware that it might be daunting for beginners.

  • On the Raspberry Pi, go to the terminal and type sudo apt-get install emacs.
  • On Mac OS/X, we suggest Aquamacs.
  • On Windows, the most recent emacs version is here.

Git.

Echomesh optionally uses the free, open-source source version control program fit to perform automatic updating.

You don't have to install git - performing a clean install has the same effect and you will not lose your work that way - but if you have git installed you can update all the nodes on your network with a single command.

Here's how to install Git

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