 One of my favorite subjects on this channel is text editors, and I've made a lot of videos about two text editors, Vim and Emacs, but I understand not everybody wants to use Vim or Emacs, because those two text editors obviously have steep learning curves, it's going to take a long time to learn how to use those particular text editors. Vim is a little weird in the fact that it has to be run in a terminal, right? Many people just want a traditional graphical text editor that they can jump right into and start getting work done in. And what I would recommend is the text editor that I actually used before I discovered Vim and Emacs, and that text editor was Genie. So let me switch over to my desktop, and I don't believe I have Genie installed if I do a search for it in the menu. Yeah, I don't have it installed here on my workstation. I haven't actually used Genie in a long time, but it was a program I'm pretty familiar with. Like I said, I used it for a while before discovering Vim, so I'm going to go ahead and install Genie from the Arch repositories, and very quick installation, right? It's a very small package. And now let me launch Genie. So let's actually open a file. Let me go up here to the menu system, and I'm going to go into my home directory. And why don't we just, well, let me control H to show hidden files here in the file picker, because I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab my Bash RC. Yeah, that way we can see some syntax highlighting and some Bash scripting. Now Genie out of the box is already very powerful. Obviously, we have the built in syntax highlighting. We have the split down here at the bottom. And if I make the split bigger, let me see if I can grab the border so you can see all the tabs. You have the status. You have the compiler. If you're compiling software that you're working on, you have messages. You have Scribble, which is you can think of it as a scratch pad. You can write yourself notes. And then of course, you have a terminal, which is useful if you need to run terminal commands. For example, like a sudo make install, you know, to compile something. In the left hand column, you see we have symbols, and then we have functions, and then we have EX and up. And those are two functions that I've written into my Bash RC. So, you know, if I click on EX, that is the extract function here, which is just a case statement for TAR and BZ, GZ and ZIP and DEM, seven ZIP and things like that. This is an extraction function where if I do EX and then name a file, if it ends in .7 ZIP, for example, it will run the proper seven ZIP command to extract that file. If it's TAR.XZ, it will run the appropriate TAR command to extract that file. That way I don't have to remember, you know, like 15 different extraction commands. I've written a function that kind of takes care of that for me. So obviously, with the symbols on the side, the syntax highlighting, and then the tabs down here with the terminal and the compiler and all of that. Obviously, Genie is more of an IDE. It really is an IDE rather than just a plain text editor. I mean, you don't have to be a programmer or developer to use Genie. I use Genie for a long time, and I don't consider myself a programmer or developer. I don't use most of the functions that are available inside this program, but even just simple edits, you know, you just wanting to do a quick config file edit. Genie was really fun to use, intuitive. One of the things that I liked about it is it is extensible. There are plugins available. For example, we're going to have to adjust the theme because this blinding white background I don't like. If you want to change the colors, you can go into edit. Actually, it's not in edit. I believe it is in view. Yeah, change color schemes. And there's only two here by default. And neither one of them is a dark theme. Well, that's okay, because we can actually go grab some themes off the internet. So let me launch a browser here, launch Brave here. And I'm going to search for Genie color schemes. And right here from the genie.org website, you can download themes or what I would do is just go grab this this GitHub repository here. And what you want to do, does it have installation instructions? Yeah, so all we need to do is get clone this repository and then run the installation shell script that is included here. So let me grab the URL. So I'm just going to copy that URL. And then what I'm going to do, let me open a terminal. I'm going to do a get clone and then the location of that repository. And now let's CD into genie dash themes, because that's the directory that it created. If I do an LS, you will see there is an install.sh file that's the install script. And then do period slash and then name of script to run the script. And it just placed all of those various genie themes, wherever it needed to be on the system and in some directory on my system. So now when I go to view change color scheme, now I have a whole bunch of other color schemes like dark gula, which is essentially a variant of Dracula dark colors, dark fruit salad, dark. Let's see. One of my favorites is monikai. That's very nice. Solarized dark is very easy on the eyes. I may just go with that. I think what I'll do is I'm going to go ahead since I haven't used genie in a while, I might actually keep it on my system and play with it. I'm going to go into preferences. So if you go into edit, preferences, let's go ahead and set this up. I'm going to show you exactly how I would set this up for my use. I'm going to pick a better font than the default mono space font. I'm going to do mononoke nerd font. And I'm going to increase the size here for you guys so you guys can see on camera. If we go into editor line wrapping, yeah, I definitely want line wrapping line breaking column that after 72 characters. Yeah, so that's this this line here is letting us know that's the 72 character mark. I typically get rid of that line because it's not something that's part of my workflow or you know, something where I really need to stay under a certain character limit. But for those of you that do need that, that line is useful. Let me get back into edit preferences. Let me see what else needs to be set up here. So we had tools terminal. So if it needs to open an external terminal command, it's going to use X term dash E shell name of command. That's fine browser. I use brave. So I changed Firefox to brave the grip command is just plain good new grip. But a lot of people like to swap out grip with things like rip grip or the silver surfer, you know, other alternative grip kind of programs. So that's why that is there. Don't need to play with templates. I'm not going to play with key bindings. The terminal I am going to play with because by default, you really can't do much with the terminal as far as configuration. A lot of that's based on system settings, but it does allow you to change the font, the foreground color and the background color. So just to make things consistent with the terminal here, I'm going to do mononoke if I can spell it correctly mononoke nerd font. And once again, I'll do 14 point font for the foreground color, I'm going to choose a custom color. And I'll do one of the polarized colors. I'll do one of the light colors, believe the light color. I look this up by the way, that is like the light yellow color that is usually the default foreground color and solarized dark for the background color. I'll do let me see what is the default background color. Let's see if that matches. Let's hit apply. Yeah. So I'm going to make this bottom split a little larger since it's got larger text to work with. Now one of the cool things about Genie is if you go into tools, you have plugin manager because you can extend Genie with plugins and you have a plugin manager that's going to show you a whole bunch of plugins you can install. Well, it looks like by default, it's only going to show me about six or seven plugins I can install by default. And that's because we need to install an extra package. So here on arch what you want to install is genie dash plugins. So if I do, well, I'm in the bash RC. I'm missing up my bash RC I'm going to do down here in the terminal sudo pacman dash s genie dash plugins and then give it my sudo password. And now that is installed. If I go to tools plugin manager, I have a lot more plugins to take a look at some of the ones that I find kind of useful. I scroll down here. There is a tree browser plugin now that I've turned that on will have a little file system in the left hand column kind of like nerd tree and Vim or neotree and emacs. Of course, we got to get rid of the symbols. They scroll through the symbols and get to the tree browser tab. I'll make that a little bigger, but you can see now you've got basically your little file manager on the left hand column there. Those of you that want a mini map, there is a mini map here, but they don't call it a mini map. They call it the overview. If I turn that on, you see, I've got this little split over here that has a mini map. And you do have some customization options with the file tree and the mini map. There's a lot of plugins here. Most of them are geared toward developers. Most of these are not things that I would find useful like in my everyday work. Again, this is more of an IDE rather than just a plain text editor. There are some version control plugins that might be useful. You do have a spell check plugin. I'm going to go ahead and turn that on and a lot of HTML and XML stuff as well in there. Now, one thing I close the plugin manager a little too soon because there was actually one plugin I was interested in. Was there a VIM emulation? Yes, VIM mode. Now, I never used this back when I used Genie because I used Genie before I actually learned VIM, but let's actually turn this on and see if this works because now I'm assuming I'm in normal mode. Yeah, J moves down, K moves up, GG to the top, capital G. So that actually works. I for insert, this is a line of text, escape, DD to delete a line, P to paste, YY to copy a line, P to paste, U to undo, U to undo, U to undo. Let's see if we can actually do command mode. Can I do colon? Yes, but you get the prompt up here, but that's kind of cool. Colon and then if I do percent S for substitution and I substitute my name because I know it appears in the header and we'll change it to all caps and then slash G. Can I do a global substitution? It didn't give me any kind of confirmation on whether that actually worked or not, but let me go to the top header. Yes. So it did exactly what I asked it to do, if I U to undo. The VIM mode actually works pretty good, at least for very basic stuff. I mean, those are the VIM commands you're going to use pretty much all the time, probably with more advanced commands, especially a lot of the G commands, Z commands, anything that involves, you know, the leader keys, anything that involves the single quotes and things like that. Once you get into that kind of stuff, it probably falls apart, but for basic VIM emulation, that's pretty good. And really why I would want this turned on in this text editor, even though I use VIM and EvilMode and Emacs, is because many times I open up these other plain text editors on camera, and when I do, invariably, I try to quit with colon Q or I try to save a file with colon W. And it never works, right? And I actually mistakenly add colon Q into my bash or C, for example, or colon W. For example, right now, if I did escape to get into normal mode, colon W for right, yeah, it saved the file. It actually saved it. So I will never accidentally, you know, booger up some of my config files if I happen to be playing around in Genie. So I'm going to leave them mode definitely turned on. Now that we've got some of these plugins installed, if I go to edit and go to preferences like we did before, that's your standard preferences. But now you also have plugin preferences. And overview is the minimap and it's only 120 pixels wide. That's kind of a small minimap. I'm going to make it 200 just so we can actually see. Oh, let me hit apply. Okay. I don't like the scroll bar. Can I get rid of the scroll bar? I'd editor scroll bar. Hit apply. Oh, I like that. And we have spell check. I'm not going to play with that right now. The tree browser. We could change what terminal things open in. I mean, I could, of course, specify a Lackrity. I can show hidden files. I definitely want to do that. Let's hit apply on that. We could even turn on single click. I'm not going to do that, though. For those of you that want to see the minimap in action on a big file, yeah, I mean that it moves along rather smoothly. One interesting thing you can do with the interface. I mean, you can remove some of this stuff up here that you don't want, or you can move it from the top to the bottom and things like that. If you go into edit preferences and go into interface, you can show status bar or not show the status bar. If I hit apply, that bottom status bar goes away. I like the status bar because it does tell you line number, column number, and things like that. So it's actually kind of useful information. I'd probably leave that. If I go into toolbar, one of the cool things you can do here is show toolbar. If you don't need the toolbar, you can just turn it off. I hit apply. Now all the tools, you'd actually just have to go into the proper menu up here and look for things. But the toolbar, one thing you could do is show toolbar and also append a toolbar to the menu, hit apply, and now that toolbar, instead of being underneath the main menu, is off to the side. And that does save on space. And I find that actually rather pleasing. So I'm actually going to leave that. And if I really wanted to complete the look because it's kind of weird having the solarized theme everywhere, but then the GTK theme is this dark gray theme instead of like this blue aquamarine kind of theme. So there are solarized GTK themes. And Genie is a GTK application. So if I do Arch Linux and do solarized GTK, let's see, there is GTK3-theme-new mix-solarized in the AUR. So this package here, well let me open a terminal. And let me install this with Paru. So Paru and then name of package. And do we want to review the package build? No, not really. It's asking for sudo password because it's got to move that GTK theme that it's installing to a protected directory and user share theme. And now let me close the terminal. Let me close the browser. Let me open up LX appearance because that is a program I use to change GTK themes. And now I have new mix-solarized dark blue. Let me hit apply on that and see if those changes take place in Genie. Well, let me restart Genie. So close Genie and restart it. Yes, that looks amazing. Yeah, I could use this, right? And this is not just it's a good text editor because it's obviously a great text editor, but you can actually make it look kind of nice, right? You can actually rice it, right? This is something that you can't do with a lot of graphical applications. One thing I would miss in Vim and Emacs are splits. And I'm pretty sure they have some split plugins available for you. If I go into tools and go into plugin manager, let me do split. Yeah, split window. Yeah, let's turn that on. And now that I've installed that, go to tools. And this is where you're going to have some options for your plugins that you've installed. And we have this menu now for split window. So do we want to do a side by side split or top and bottom split? Let's do side by side. I kept the overview in the first one. So that's a little bit of a glitch. I wonder if I close Genie and reopen it. Yeah, well obviously the split goes away, but the minimap, the overview is still there as well. So I've gone on way too long here, theming and playing with Genie here, but I wanted to share with you guys this fantastic plain text editor. It's more than a text editor, right? It's obviously an IDE. It's really geared toward developers and programmers. And for those of you in that line of work and maybe looking for something, Genie is great. One of the reasons that I used Genie, what attracted me to it, is because for most text editors that have the kind of functionality that Genie has, which is a proper IDE, has got all these plugins and things, most of those editors that are out there are proprietary, you know, the IDE editors, you know, like sublime text, for example, to throw one out that's very popular that a lot of people use are all the IntelliJ IDEs and things like that. This is completely free and open source. Genie is actually licensed under the GPL. And for that, I respect that. It's one of the things that really attracted me to actually give it a try. And once I tried it, I fell in love with it. And I hope you guys that are looking for a new text editor give it a try too. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Devin Gabe James, Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott West, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid DiHillkide, Dylan George, Lee Lennox, Ninja, Maxim, Mike Irion, Alexander, Pete Larch, and Fedora Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the Genie text editor wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. You want to see more great videos about Lennox, great free and open source software like Genie, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.