> You lost a lot of time and energy dealing with issues like: Using vim; copying files back and forth with scp; losing the network connection; the college shared machine is slow and yucky.
Sometimes struggling with the tools you don't like and ending up at the ones you do build "character" and some familiarity with struggling with the unfamiliar. Those can be formative even if they're not "efficient" towards finishing an assignment as soon as possible. I think there's a balance to strike here, and as others have noted, some people _like_ vim and SCP, so which setup is "right" is subjective and requires a bit of struggling (albeit ideally time-boxed / within reason) to find it.
That said, I would've _killed_ to have this much help getting started as a novice programmer. I *love* how much effort and care this person puts into helping their kid(s) manage the whirlwind of early CS and university.