Better Late Than Never

I could have sworn I did a post for last week but the proof is in the pudding... and there's nothing in the pudding.
Last week I used ubuntu server and text editors to configure files and get updates. Really, following step by step directions is easy. Understanding exactly what I'm doing and getting the big picture is much more difficult.
I was able to install the vim tutor and that was kind of fun to use in a "because it was there" kind of way. With nano I don't really know what I configured the files to do. I didn't see any hidden files after using the alias commands. I could see them when I typed ls -a as expected.
The one thing I did understand was getting the updates. That's pretty straightforward and I run updates frequently so I knew what I was doing.