Basics

In order to use the early versions of 3color-Press it is very useful to have some information on hand about general computing with the context of using the command line and understanding files, folders and directories as well as getting slightly familiar with Python. This won’t be teaching you anything complicated, it’s only here to make it easier if anyone is having trouble figuring out where to start or go and to potentially cover some very basic troubleshooting issues that might occur.

Getting Nerdy

Eventually 3color-Press may turn into a self contained app with a visual interface, but we aren’t quite there yet! So we’ll need to be famliar with working with computers at a command line level.

Terminology

In this document I’ll try to explain some very basic terms and ideas which may come up elsewhere in the documentation.

To get started let’s look at files and folders on your computer. You may be used to browsing these via a file browser on you computer. (such as finder on OsX and Explorer on windows) If you are great, I expect most people to be but with the growing abstraction of file management in the mobile era, one can’t be too sure.

Another word used for folder is directory, these are words are used interchangably.

Command Line

To install 3color-Press you’ll have to be not scared of doing a little command line, it doesn’t get more complicated than running a few commands to get things done. Of course you could always do more but we’ll to the basics.

In OsX the default terminal is an application in the utilities folder named Terminal. In windows you can use Command Prompt or Powershell.

This is what you’ll be using to run any commands you see show up.

Note

In example commands in the documentation you’ll see $ command option. You don’t have to type the $, it simple represents the user prompt before the input field.

File Editing

Configuration and content creation for 3color-Press is based around editing and creating text files. While command line file editors do exist, such as vim, emacs, nano. There are plenty of free editors out there. I use github’s atom editor and have even included command that will open your project folder with atom.

List of file editors to look at:

To save you some time I recomend atom as it is free and easy to install and manage.