 So, I've been an Emacs user for a little over two years now, and one of the cool things with Emacs is there's so many programs out there that are written in Emacs Lisp or Emacs, right? Emacs has its own package manager that you can install packages from. It's almost like its own operating system practically. And because there's so many Emacs packages out there, you can probably find a package that does whatever it is you can dream of, whatever it is you want to do. So today, I spent some time exploring various Emacs programs that I had not heard of before, and I was trying them out to see if maybe they were both fun and also useful, you know, something that I might actually add to my config. So let me show you some of the things I discovered today. So let me switch over to my desktop here, and let me go ahead and launch Doom Emacs here, and I'm just going to go ahead and open my config file here, and I'm zoomed in here so you guys can see. The very first program that I installed today was Beacon, which I've heard of Beacon before, but I never thought, you know, I really needed it until I actually tried it out and turned it on. And I think this particular program is awesome, because what this does, let me move my scroll wheel on the mouse. I'm going to scroll up and down with the scroll wheel. I'm just going to do, you know, small adjustments, but you see it shines, right? It blinks. That's awesome, because especially when you make big jumps. Where does the cursor point end up? Well, let me make a big jump, right? I know exactly where the cursor point is. Now if it's just this blue box, it might get lost, especially, you know, all the other blue coloring and text and bullet points and things on the page. But now, anytime I move, I know exactly where that cursor point ends up with a big scroll wheel movement or, you know, page up, page down, because of course the cursor point is going to move with you, but you never know exactly where it's going to end up. What line it's going to end up, right? And visually, that just stands out. I was really happy with Beacon. Again, very simple program. That is all it does is that cursor flash. And you see, all you need to do when you install Beacon is make sure Beacon-Mode is set to 1. That means it's enabled. And do me max to install Beacon. All you need to do, of course, to install any package and do me max is to go into your packages.el and then, you know, add a line here, you know, inside the parentheses package, exclamation, space, name of program, Beacon is the name of the program. And you can see some of the other programs I played with today, these last four here. The next one I played with was Clippy. Now let me show you Clippy. You can probably guess what Clippy does, but let me scroll down here to what I added here in my config.org for Clippy. So what Clippy is, obviously, it's going to give us that pop-up box with the little paperclip character, Clippy. You guys remember Clippy from Microsoft Office. This is what we're going to have inside Emacs. It's not the same thing. What it's going to do is in Emacs, Emacs is self-documenting. It has a lot of help documentation. Every variable, every function, every bit of code that's written in Emacs list, that's part of Emacs, you can look up the documentation for. And Clippy just serves kind of as a front end to two of the more common help functions, which are described function and described variable. So now you have two other functions. You have Clippy-described function and Clippy-described variable. And I've key-binded those, so let me show you this in action. So this here, dashboard-headings, that's a variable. You can see set Q in front of it. Set Q is usually used to assign a variable. So if I do my key-bindings, which were space, C, H, F for function, it's going to describe the function inside the parentheses, which is set Q. It's a function. If I do space, C, H, V for variable, it's going to describe the variable that is under the cursor point, which was dashboard-set-headings-icons. And it just gives a little bit of information. Now if you require more detailed information, because some of these variables and function are going to have a lot of documentation and Clippy is only going to show you so much, then you would probably want to use the proper describe variable command here. If I do that correctly, describe variable, and then search for, in this case, we'll do the same one, dashboard-set-headings-icons. And actually, yeah, there was very little information on that particular variable. So actually, Clippy was able to actually show all of that information. Let me Q to quit out of that split. Now here inside Doom Emacs, if I do space B next for buffer next, I move back to the packages.el buffer that we open, so I get back to this file. And the next package I played with I thought was kind of interesting. I don't know if I will use it, but I did add it to my config was the mini-map program here. So if I do space B, P for buffer previous, I'll go back to the config file. And let me look for the mini-map section here. Yeah, there it is. So a mini-map, most of you guys know what a mini-map is. If you've ever used proper IDEs like VS Code, Sublime Text, or even some simpler text editors like Kate in KDE Plasma has the ability to have a mini-map, which is a little side column that is a really small representation of your entire document. Now I personally don't use mini-maps, but I know a lot of people find them useful. So I added mini-map. The program name is simply mini-map. So if I go back to my previous buffer here, you see package, exclamation, mini-map. And then once I have that and turn mini-map on, right, I set the key binding by the way, space TM to toggle the mini-map, space TM to toggle it back on. And if I scroll, you can see this is not a very lengthy document. Now my config.org is a very lengthy document, but there's one problem. And I made a note of it here in the comments is that mini-map does not work inside org documents. For some reason, mini-map cannot handle org documents. And it's not just this particular program. Every mini-map program I've ever tried, they crap out in org for some reason. I don't know. But if I find a different file, you know, how about config.el, which is the rendered Emacs Lisp from that org document, you know, this is, you know, this is actually pretty smooth and the mini-map looks good, right? It's not bad if you want a mini-map, I think most people would be happy with that particular program. Now, of course, once you've added the mini-map, let me go back to this buffer here, which is the Emacs Lisp file. Once you've added that mini-map, what you could do, I mean, I could toggle on Neotree, which is, you know, kind of like a, you guys familiar with Nerdtree and Vim Neotree inside Emacs is kind of like your file system, you know, on the left-hand pane is what I have this set to. I do space DN for directory Neotree, meaning go to a different directory, let me go to a larger directory where you can really see, you know, the icons and the directory structure. That's my config directory.config. So really, at this point, you know, Emacs kind of turns into a proper IDE, right? It's got everything that you could possibly want. It's got everything that VS code and sublime ticks have and more. I mean, at this point, heck, if I really wanted to, I mean, I could, you know, open a vterm, which is a terminal down here in this bottom split. That way I can run terminal commands. You know, like if I'm working on something, and maybe it's a piece of code, maybe I'm working on some of my suckless configs and I want to do a make install, you know, I keep a terminal open for that kind of stuff. I keep a file manager open. I've got my mini map open. If I have to make a push to my GitLab at that point, I can open up MAG it and do a push. You know, just everything that you could possibly want Emacs has. And that's why I've really designed my workflow these days. I spend almost all my time inside Emacs. So those three packages, I'm going to keep in my config because I think they're useful. I'm definitely going to use beacon. And I think Clippy and mini map, they may not be the most useful programs, but at least they're fun. Right. They're fun and useful. Now I did install one completely useless program, but I thought it was so strange. I did want to keep it installed briefly just to show you guys this on camera. So let me go back to the packages.el. I installed SelectricMode. Now what is SelectricMode? Well, let me turn this thing on. It's going to be annoying, but let me enable SelectricMode. And now let me start typing. Watch this. I'm going to just type a random sentence. Now this isn't working properly right now, probably because I'm recording. What should happen is you guys should hear a typewriter click for every time I press a key. Now old school, electric typewriter, and it's loud and it's annoying, like it's really annoying. I think the way I can fix this so you guys can actually hear it on a recording is for me to stop capturing my microphone and then let me try this. Yeah, I'm definitely not keeping that one, so I'm going to go ahead and get rid of SelectricMode here. Obviously, I didn't add it to my config.org, but I think I'm going to keep Beacon, Clippy, and Minimap. I'm pretty happy with those packages. So those are just a few neat packages I found for Emacs that maybe you guys want to give a try. Those of you that are using my config or take inspiration from my config, I'll push my latest config files to my .files repo on GitLab. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode and the following people. Devin, Gabe, James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, Armored, Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, I lost my place. Dylan, George, the Helinix, Ninja, Maxim, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Infador, Polytech, Grid, Prophet, Steven, Willie, I probably should go back and re-record that whole thing. I'm not going to do it. Let's just keep going. Those shows are also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. 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, right? If you like my work and want to support me, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. Join us now and share the software. You'll be free hacker.