 I really love Emacs, and I know a lot of you guys love Emacs too, and when people talk about how great Emacs is, they typically talk about really two things as being the killer features for Emacs. They often talk about org mode, and they often talk about Maggot, which is the Git client. Well today I wanted to show you guys another really killer feature for Emacs, and that is the LFeed RSS Feed Reader. Now the distribution of Emacs that I use is a distribution called Doom Emacs. I've made a ton of videos about Doom Emacs in the past. I think it's just fantastic. It makes installing extensions in Emacs a lot easier. It makes it very easy to install programs like LFeed and get up and running with a program like LFeed. So let me switch over to my desktop, and let me launch Doom Emacs. And the first thing you want to do is go to the init.el file. So let me get to my init.el. This is the init file for Doom Emacs, and let me toggle on big font mode here, so the font is nice and big. Hopefully you guys can read this. Now the init.el for Doom Emacs is essentially a list of all of the default modules that are available in Doom Emacs. And all you do is go in and uncomment the lines of the modules you want, or comment out the lines of the modules you don't want. There's, I don't know, probably a couple of hundred things here, and if you did a search for RSS, one of the modules is an RSS module that is actually LFeed. So if you uncomment this line, which I've already got mine uncommented, then all you need to do is, after uncommenting the RSS line, then you need to rebuild Doom Emacs. You could do that at the command line by running a doomsync, or you could do that within Emacs itself. The keybinding for Doom Emacs to rebuild is spaceHRR. So if I do spaceHRR, what happens is it opens the split at the bottom, which is a terminal. It's a V term, and what it's doing, it's running the doomsync command right here inside a terminal inside Emacs. And if it rebuilds successfully, which it did, if we get config successfully reloaded, then you should now be able to find LFeed if you do a meta x alt x and search for LFeed. There is the LFeed program, and if I hit enter, there is LFeed. Now this is what LFeed looks like by default within Doom Emacs. The only thing that is different is I already had my feeds set up. Obviously you have to add some feeds, and the way you need to do that in Doom Emacs is you specify a list of RSS feeds in your config.el, or if you use an org file for your config like I do in your config.org. So let me open up my config, so I'm going to open up my config.org here, and let's move my config to a different workspace so you guys can see this. So this is my Doom Emacs config, and somewhere in my config one of the headings is LFeed. If I click that, it'll actually take us to that section of the config. And you see right here, this is the relevant elisp code that you need to know. You need to know setq space LFeed-feeds, and then quote, the quote is very important. And then here inside the parentheses, we have the URL to each RSS feed that I want to appear in LFeed. And then outside the quotes here, I have words, typically these words are actually tags. So it's pretty easy to just go and find all of your favorite RSS feeds, get their URLs, and then just put them in a list here. And then out to the side, just do a couple of tags, whatever it is you want to be able to search for if you want to do a tag search. So now that you've seen what I have in my config, if I go back to LFeed, you can see. Right now at the top here, that is the Emacs subreddit, that's the feed that's R slash command line from Reddit, and you know, opensource.com, Pheronix, LXR, OMG, Ubuntu is in here, beta news, gaming on Linux, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And if I wanted to read one of these stories, for example, this very first story, disable basic GUI elements for Olivetti, well, I could open that. And you see, I get this horizontal split at the bottom, where I get a preview of that story. And if I wanted to actually read the whole story in a browser, I mean, I could click on the link here, and it should open that up in my web browser of choice, which is actually EWW, the Emacs web browser, it opens in a horizontal split. That's actually a little hard to read because everything is in a horizontal split. So what I want to do is actually, I want those LFeed stories to appear in a vertical split. And I think the easiest way to do that is enabling a new module called LFeed dash goodies. So let me get back into my config.org. And the first thing you want to do when you install a new package in Doom, if it's one of the basic modules, you can do that in the init.el that we saw before. If it's an extra package that is not part of the base packages, you need to open a file called packages.el. This is all the third party packages, extra Emacs plugins that I have added. And you see I added LFeed dash goodies. You need to add that. Then you also need to, in your config.org, let me go to my next buffer here, and your config.org or your config.el, depending on how you do your config file. You need to add these three lines here, require, and then quote LFeed dash goodies, and then LFeed dash goodies slash set up and then set Q LFeed dash goodies slash entry pane size 0.5. Now you really don't need that one. That is just a configuration option that I like. I'm going to comment that back out for a second so you guys can see this. So once you've added LFeed dash goodies to the packages.el and then you require LFeed dash goodies, then you need to rebuild Doom Emacs again. So space HRR and we get the terminal in the horizontal split at the bottom. It's running a Doom sync and the config reloaded successfully. And let me go back to the second workspace here and I'm going to relaunch LFeed. And now LFeed, this is LFeed dash goodies. You see now the top is different. We have this power line like effect. The other thing you will notice is if I want to read a story, everything's out of order before too. And now you get the feed first, then you get the tags, then you get the subject. And remember before it was in a different order. You had the tags, I think, and then you had the subject and then you had the the feed. So let me go to one of these stories. I don't know how about disabled basic GUI elements again. And now you see instead of having a horizontal split at the bottom, it opens in a vertical split and it actually covers up like the rest of the screen. Like it opens almost like in a 70 or 75% split here and it covers up what used to be shown on the screen. Remember, we had the list of files. Now I don't like that. I want to still be able to read everything in the list. And that is why I had this line here. Set LFeed dash goodies slash entry pain size to 0.5. That's setting it to take up 50% of the screen because as you saw by default, it takes up like 75, 80% of the screen. So I'm going to enable that and then space HRR again to reload Doom Emacs. And it's running the Doom sync. And if it rebuilds correctly, yeah, config successfully reloaded. So there were no errors. Let me go back to LFeed here. And actually what I want to do, let me just close out Emacs. What I'm going to do is I'm going to run a kill all Emacs. And now let me relaunch Doom Emacs here. And I'm going to do meta X and LFeed. And now when I look at LFeed, I'm not going to toggle on big font mode this time because I want to make sure I have plenty of space to show you what goes on here. So I'm just going to leave it as my normal font size here. I mean, I could do J and K, you know, standard vim motion keys to go down the list of things. And let's go to the first story, which I opened earlier. And now instead of opening, you know, in like a 75 or 80% split where it would cover, you know, all of the text over here. It actually opens in a 50% split, which makes more sense because even if you had it opening at like 75 or 80%, typically you're going to have line wrapping at about 80 characters, I think, in this thing anyway. So you're still going to have all of this wasted space out to the far right. So I think 50% makes sense. Also, you know, that normal kind of like 13, 14 font size. You know, you can actually display all the information. You get your subreddits or whatever RSS feed you're reading out over here. You've got your tags here. Then you've got the actual titles. And then you can actually preview the news feed item, of course, here in the far right pane. Now, one of the things that kind of annoys me a little bit with L feed out of the box here. Now, you can move J and K with the vim motion keys because we're in evil mode here in Doomy Max. I mean, I could J to go down and I could find another story and hit enter. And when I hit enter, my cursor is actually over here in the split pane. So if I want to move down to the next story, while I'm over here in previewing the actual feed, what I need to do is get my cursor back over here. Of course, I could do that with the mouse or I could just do the standard key binding, the VIM key binding, control W followed by a W will get me back over into this split. Kind of how you can swap between two vertical splits in VIM with control W followed by a W that works here. So control W followed by a W gets me back over here. Then I could hit enter to preview the next one, but now my cursor's back over in this pane. I'd have to do control W W again to get my cursor back over to the left hand column. So what I ended up doing is let me open up my Doom config again. And in my config, let me toggle on big font mode again. I added this here, evil-define-key quote normal L feed show mode map and I defined some key bindings. I wanted Shift J and Shift K to move the story, like when I'm navigating up and down on the stories that that preview pane also changes with me. Let me show you this in action. So now that I have those key bindings set, let me open up that split. I'm on the very first story now. Watch what happens when I do Shift J. I move to the next story, Shift J again. I just keep moving down the list of stories and I keep getting a preview of each one. And if I keep moving down because again, Emacs is graphical. If any of these RSS feed stories have images, images do display of course inside Emacs. So that's one of the nice things that if you get any kind of feeds that are lengthy articles with lots of images, you actually don't need to actually open them in a web browser. You don't need to open them in EWW. The browser inside Emacs, you don't need to open them in Chrome or Firefox or anything like that. You can just do all of that right here. And I really have been enjoying using Elfied. I don't really do much with RSS news readers. I like tracking a lot of my favorite subreddits with RSS. That's one of the things I've been doing for a while now. But other than that, like news articles and things like that, typically I'll just, I'll be honest, these days I get most of my news from various subreddits. But every subreddit does have an RSS feed attached to it. So that's kind of how I've been using Elfied. Anyway, I didn't want to dive too deep into Elfied because to be honest, I haven't done much with it. It's pretty much stock Elfied out of the box. All I did is in Doomy Max, I uncommitted RSS in the net.el that actually installs Elfied for you. Then I installed an extra package, Elfied-Goodies. And then I made some minor adjustments to the size of the panes and added a couple of unique key bindings so I can actually move up and down the feeds and actually have the previews move up and down with me as well. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Epsy, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, ArchFeed530, Chuck David, the other David Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Scott, Wes, and Willie, these guys. They are my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at the Elfied RSS reader inside Doomy Max, it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names are seeing on the screen right now. These are all the folks that help support me over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors here at DistroTube. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community, and I need your help. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.