Clarifying defining the .gitignore file in Ep.6 Ignoring things

[seacatkim]

As I novice going through this lesson (also my second pull request), it was not clear that the lesson is implying you need to define what you want to ignore with the '.gitignore' file as it jumps straight to the output of the new '.gitignore' file. This is likely because I am not familiar with nano.

Also a side note, the lesson starts using 'echo' toward the end and also the 'touch' command when creating new files which novices may not be familiar with. The 'Tracking Changes' episode does mention you can use any editor with a link to information about editors. Perhaps being consistent throughout the lesson with the editor or a line explaining echo is another editor would be helpful.

---

Thanks for contributing! If this contribution is for instructor training, please send an email to checkout@carpentries.org with a link to this contribution so we can record your progress. You’ve completed your contribution step for instructor checkout just by submitting this contribution.

Please keep in mind that lesson maintainers are volunteers and it may be some time before they can respond to your contribution. Although not all contributions can be incorporated into the lesson materials, we appreciate your time and effort to improve the curriculum. If you have any questions about the lesson maintenance process or would like to volunteer your time as a contribution reviewer, please contact The Carpentries Team at team@carpentries.org.

---

[munkm]

Hi @seacatkim! Thanks for your feedback about gitignore in this lesson. I know this particular topic can be difficult for new learners, so your contribution and thoughts here are much appreciated!

I like one of the lines you've changed, but the other I think makes this part of the lesson repetitive. I've requested that be changed before we merge your PR. Let me know what you think!

the lesson starts using 'echo' toward the end and also the 'touch' command when creating new files which novices may not be familiar with.

This is a really good point that you're bringing up. In earlier episodes of this lesson, we show changes with nano followed by cat, and then in episodes 05, 09, and 14 we use redirects to modify the file. All of these commands should be covered by the bash lesson prior to teaching the git lesson, but I think it might be worthwhile to add reminder callout boxes in this lesson to remind learners of their meaning. What do you think? would that be helpful to you as a learner?

[munkm]

I like this modification to the text.

[munkm]

I think this added text here is repetitive. The line just below the shell the output of cat says what is being ignored, and the line just above this one states our intent to ignore files that aren't going to matter to our project. Would you mind changing this text back to the original wording?

[munkm]

Alternatively, this sentence could be modified to further state how we plan to change the .gitignore file. e.g.

We do this by creating a file in the root directory of our project called .gitignore. Then we'll add lines specifying which files we'd like to ignore in our project.