Engineer Toolkit

The tools you will use every day: Linux and the shell, permissions and pipes, the Emacs and vi editors, VS Code in the cloud, and how to use an AI assistant well.

OverviewThe tools you will use every day: the Linux system, the shell with permissions and pipes, the Emacs and vi text editors, the VS Code cloud environment, and using an AI assistant wisely. Each part opens with an animation and explains the idea from the ground up.
Introduction to LinuxBefore typing any command, understand what Linux actually is: an open kernel that servers and phones run on, and why you talk to it in text rather than clicks.
The shell and moving around the file systemYour first commands: where am I, what is here, go there, make a file. Four commands are enough to live in the terminal for a whole day.
Files and permissionsEvery file has an owner, a group and three questions: who reads, who writes, who runs. This lesson teaches you to read a permission line and change it with confidence, which is behind half of all Permission denied messages.
Redirection and pipesEvery command reads from somewhere and writes to somewhere. Change those two places with > and | and small tools become one big tool you write in a single line. This is the terminal's real power.
Emacs: An Editor That Lives in the TerminalEmacs is an endlessly extensible text editor driven by key chords. You will understand its own vocabulary (buffer, point, mark, kill ring) and learn the core shortcuts by their logic rather than blind memorization.
The vi Editorvi is present on almost every Linux machine, even tiny ones. The key to mastering it is one idea: the editor has modes, and each mode gives the keys a different meaning. Once you grasp that, editing becomes fast and mous
VS Code for the WebAfter the shell and text editors comes a full development environment: editor, file explorer and terminal in one browser window, running on a temporary Ubuntu sandbox in the cloud such as GitHub Codespaces. You will learn its parts, shortcuts, an
The AI AssistantThe AI assistant speeds up learning when used as a coach, not a replacement for thinking. You will learn how to phrase a good question, a debugging ladder, and etiquette that protects your own skills.
Everyday Linux commands: search, processes and packagesThe commands an engineer uses daily: find and grep to search, ps, top and kill for processes, df and du for space, apt for packages, curl for the network, ssh for servers, and tar for archives.
Shell scripts: automate what you repeatWhen you type the same commands a third time, put them in a script: the shebang line, variables, $1 arguments, conditions, loops, exit codes and set -e.
PowerShell: the terminal on WindowsThe modern Windows terminal (it runs on Linux and macOS too): verb-noun commands, a pipeline that passes objects rather than text, filtering and selecting, the equivalents of Linux commands, and .ps1 scripts.
Wrap-up and resourcesThe best outside resources for these lessons, classified by kind and level. All are open to everyone and need no account on any platform. Use the filters to narrow the list.