To give you an impression of how we like to combine GUI tools with command-line editors, we've given the following example workflow. Don't worry about not understanding all steps yet; at the end of the book, you should come back to this example and understand exactly what we're talking about.

When you're writing shell scripts, you normally go through a few phases:

1. Gather requirements for the shell script.
2. Design the shell script.
3. Write the shell script.
4. Test and adjust the shell script.
5. (Optional) Submit the working shell scripts to your version control system.

Phases 1 and 2 are often done without writing actual code. You think about the purpose of the script, how it could be implemented, and what is gained by creating the script. These steps often involve research and looking for best practices. When you feel like you have a good idea about why, what, and how you're going to write your shell script, you move on to phase 3: writing the script. At this point, you would open your favorite GUI-based editor and start typing away. Because the GUI editor has autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and other productivity features built in, you can efficiently write most of the shell script code. After you feel like your script is ready for testing, you need to move away from your GUI: the script has to be tested on the system it's been designed for.

Phase 4 begins. You copy and paste the script to the server, using either Vim or nano. Once the script is on the server, you run it. Most of the time, it will not actually do everything you expected it to do. Tiny mistakes are easy to make and easy to fix, but it would be a small hassle to go back to the GUI editor, change it, save it, transfer it to the server, and run it again! Luckily, we can use either Vim or nano to make minor changes to fix the script right there on the server and try again. A missing ; or " will make a shell script unusable, but it's fixed quickly (although errors like that are often highlighted in the GUI editors, so those are unlikely to make it onto the server, even for the first version).

Finally, after a number of iterations, your script will work as expected. Now you have to make sure the full and correct script is uploaded to your version control system. It's recommended to transfer the script from the GUI to the server one last time, to see whether you have applied all the changes you made on the server to your GUI session as well. Once that is done, commit it, and you're finished!