Doom Emacs And Creating A Literate Config

So, I recently switched back over to using Doom EMAs, which I really like Doom EMAX. I got a basic installation and configuration up and running, but I've done very minor tweaks to it thus far. Today, I wanted to customize it a little more. There's a few things in the Doom Emac configuration that I'd like to change a little bit. So, let's jump into it. So, let me go ahead and launch Doom Emac. And the very first thing I want to do is I want to play around a little bit with the configuration file. So, we do have a key binding space FP. Space FP for find private config files. And the private config files they're talking about are your Doom EMAC config files. You've got three basic config files. You got the init. You've got your packages. And the most important one is the config.el. And this is where you do a lot of your personal customization settings. Now, on that initial video I did about Doomax, I didn't do much configuration to the config. I only made one change because the font was really small for me. So, I went ahead and changed the font. I switched the font family over to Jet Brains Mono for the font and I set the size to 15. But there's some other things I want to do with fonts here. For one thing, I do a lot with org mode. Let me launch another window and let me search for an org document. For example, I've got this old org document from a previous Doom EMAC config that I used years ago. And you can see uh the headers here, the org headers, they don't have variable font sizes. For readability, I like making like top level headers in org documents really big. Second level headers slightly less big. Third levels headers uh slightly less big. You guys have seen that in all of my videos for years and years. all my org documents, you've seen those variable font sizes using org mode. And what I've done is I've created this block of code here. Right now, it is commented out. It's not turned on because I wanted to you to see the before and the after. So, let me go ahead and uncomment these lines here that I've got commented out. Now, there is a program in Emacs called comment- line. If you do meta x and type comment dash line, here is a program. It has a default key binding which is controll X followed by control semicolon. I hate those control kind of EMAC key chords. I'm going to set that to something more doom ccentric. And Doom of course uses space as the leader key. So I'm going to create a key binding for the comment line function that uses the space leader key rather than control. So let me scroll down a little bit and I've got these two lines here that are commented out. Let me go ahead and uncomment these lines. And this is an example of how to set a keybinding in Doom EMAC. You use this function here, map exclamation, and then you give it a key binding. You give it the description of the key binding, and then you give it the actual Emacs function, the Emacs program to run. So in this case, the keybinding is going to involve leader. The leader key in DoomX is space. And then the other key involved is going to be the minus symbol. Now, why did I choose space minus for this? Well, if I hit space on the keyboard, the witch key program comes up. Which key is a EMAC program that tells you the possible key bindings. So, any key I hit on the keyboard, it tells me the next possible keys and what they would do. So, if I hit space, here are all of the other key bindings that I could do with the space key that I've already hit the one time. And I notice they're using most everything on the keyboard. pretty much every key on the keyboard except they weren't using the minus symbol. So that's why I chose space minus for this is because it wasn't in use. So space which is leader minus is going to run this function here, the comment line function. And then I give it a description and the description is comment line. Uh the description would be what shows up when you do which key. So, I've already got this commented out and I think I've already reloaded the config before. So, it's already available to me. But just to make sure, space HRR reloads Doom Emacs. But if I hit the space key, you will see I actually do have the minus symbol here now. And it says comment line. That was the description I gave it. And if I hit the minus symbol, it's going to run the comment line program, which just commented out that one line, the line I was on, which obviously I didn't want to do. If I really wanted to comment this out, I'd need to do the whole block of code here. So, I'd get into visual block mode here or visual line mode here in a evil mode in in Vim mode essentially. And I would highlight the entire block of code I want to comment. And now all I have to do is space minus and I just commented that out. U to undo. Now, if they were already commented out and I wanted to uncomment them. So, let me control R to redo. That's a standard BIM key binding. Let me once again get into visual line mode. I like the lines that I want to uncomment. Space minus, right? And so the comment line function, it comments out lines that aren't commented and it uncomments lines that are commented. So it's a really handy function. I would suggest anybody using Emacs have that as a a easy keybinding for you, especially if you do any kind of scripting and programming because you're going to be commenting and uncommenting lines constantly if you're a scriptor or programmer. So, now that I've got that done, let me go back up here to the block of code that I was wanting to uncomment for the variable org header settings. So, let's go ahead highlight the block of code. Space minus to uncomment that. Let me go ahead and write that space hrR to reload Doom Emacs. And now let me check out an org file. So let me go to any org document. And now you can see I have variable font uh sizes as far as the org headers. The top level headers are really big. The second level headers a little less big. Thirdle headers if I have any in here would be a little less big. Um I don't have a lot of third level headers. It's mostly just first and second level headers in this document. But if I close this out and get back into the config. Zoom in here, you can see the settings here. You have org level one, that's the top level. Org level two, the second level down. So you when you're doing your outline and or mode, all the way down to org level 8. And I set these to various font sizes. For the top level, I did 1.6. So basically, we're making it 60% bigger font for the top level header. 50% bigger font for the second level, 40% bigger font for the third level, all the way down until, you know, the seventh and eighth level headers, which I almost will never get an outline that's that far deep, but if I do, it's just normal 1.0 font. So, it's basically your standard font size. The other thing I set here was this here, or document title, and I set that to 1.8, 80% bigger, a really big font. What is a org document title? Well, let me go back into the org document or just any org document and go to the top. There is the title. It's the title tag. And you can see it makes the title of the document, you know, a gigantic kind of font that really stands out. And of course, you could set it to bold or not. I set bold to T. I set underline to Neil false so it doesn't underline it. But if I wanted it underlined, I could set that to T. So those were the first things I really wanted to do with the Doom Max configuration. Get those org headers right. Get a a key binding set for commenting lines and uncommenting lines. The next thing is some basic settings. So in the default Doomaxconfig.el, you have a line for setting the default org directory. So the directory where your org documents go. Typically this is set to your home directory/org with a lowercase o. In my case, I have my org uh folder, my org directory set to a nextcloud server. So I have a folder on my system called NC for nextcloud, which is a nextcloud server that I used to file sync across all my devices. And in that I have org with a capital O, and that's what I want to set my org directory to. Some other things I want to set here is if I go down to this line here and just do space minus. Let's go ahead and unset this. And I'll go ahead and uncomment this as well. So they use a program in Doomax now called modern table or org modern table. It basically makes your org tables look a little fancy. Now when I say Doomax is using or modern table by default, it's not turned on by default. Although if you turn it on, these I believe are default settings. To turn on the uh or modern table, you might have to do the uh the pretty addition to or So if you go into your enit.ele, remember the init.el file. This is where you turn on and off some of the default Doom modules. So these are modules that are just part of Doomax. So you can just comment outlines, uncomment outlines and turn these on. Org mode, of course, is one of the default modules and you could turn it on and off as well. For example, if you don't want to use org mode for some reason, you could turn it off. I don't know why you would be using Emacs though and not want to use org mode. But by default, you have org here and it's uncommented. And if you want to turn on the pretty mode, just add plus pretty inside parenthesis to org in the init. And I think I might have done that in order to uh to get the org modern table look. Now, these settings I think may be default settings they're using. I just put these in my config just to remind me that they're using org modern table and because I may or may not want to turn off this program at some point. By default, it's turned on. Set Q. By the way, if you're unfamiliar with how EMAC list works and you know configuring EMAC, set Q is assigning a variable to a value. So set Q, the variable is or modern table. And what are we assigning it as a value? It needs to be either T or new. So true or false. If it's T, then or modern table is turned on. And what that is is you got the fancy tables in your org documents. Let me scroll down. You know, I got tables here. You see, you got these wide bars. You got a little bit of a gap, you know, in between the u basically your separator lines as well. You know, it looks a little fancy. Now, one thing I didn't like about the default Doomax config, and this was not the case when I used it years ago. Let me search for to-do. Okay, here is a line that has the word to-do in it. Uh, let me get out of that search. You know, by default, you know, in previous years, you had these to-do keywords, these org to-do keywords. You can see this variable here, and they would be highlighted in a certain way, and that is not the case uh out of the box, I don't think, with Doom EMAX, the default config now. But what I've done is I've added this hook. So, I've added hook, org mode hook. So, anytime you're in an org document and or mode is turned on, the hook, the major mode is um org mode, right? The org mode hook. What I want you to do is I want you to turn on highlight to-do mode. Highlight to-do is a Emacs program that highlights the word to-do. For example, turning it orange in this case. So, you know, now that I've got all of these lines uncommented, let me go ahead and space HRR to reload Emacs. So, let me get into an Word document. You know, now I've got to-do. If I do to-do here, you know, now I get some fancy coloring. I I get actually a yellow background. Uh, and this is customizable. You could actually change some of this, but this really stands out, right? Where before if I had just typed the word to-do, it would just be the word to-do colored, you know, the same as the rest of the font in this header. But I wanted it to visually stand out. So that is the highlight to-do mode. The next thing I wanted to change, let's scroll down here to some other changes that I have made. One thing I don't like about Doom EMAX out of the box and GNU Emacs out of the box is that anytime you decide to get out of Emacs, kill a window, kill a frame, uh it it asks you for confirmation. Hey, do you really want to close Emacs or close this window? And you know it gets annoying because you're constantly closing out of things and then having to answer Y or N, yes or no, you know, to kill EMAC. In this case, I want to set this variable. So set Q confirm kill EMAC. That's a variable, right? And that needs to be set to T or nil, true or false. In this case, I want it to be set to nil. I do not want to be asked for confirmation when I'm killing a EMAC window. So let me go ahead and write that space hrR to restart. And actually, I think I'm just going to kill Emacs all the way. So, let me open a terminal. Let me kill all Emacs. Let me restart the Emacs Damon. So, we're just restarted the Emacs server. So, now let me restart Emacs. Uh, and now when I close it, it doesn't ask me anything. Let me restart it again. One thing I want to do though is uh I don't like this dashboard. Uh, the dashboard is cool if you're brand new to Doom EMAC because it gives you some basic key bindings. For me, I already know the key bindings. I'm going to set my own key bindings for a lot of this stuff. This screen really doesn't do much for me. I don't need it. So, I could pick any starting buffer I want in Emacs. I could have Emacs launch any buffer as the initial buffer rather than the dashboard. So, what would be something appropriate? Well, it could be I could set the initial buffer to be my EMAC config if I know I'm going to play in my EMAC config a lot every time I open my EMAC config. But opening to a specific file, not great uh for most people, I would imagine. Uh opening deer ed the file manager as the initial buffer could be cool, you know, just opening dear ed in my home directory for example. And from here I could navigate wherever. But I also, you know, most of the time when I'm doing something in Emacs, I'm either editing a file or I'm going to do something in a terminal. So I was thinking about setting my initial buffer to the EShell, the EMAC EShell because I think that makes sense for the initial buffer here. So let me go ahead and launch the EShell. You know, this is ESL just a standard kind of shell except this is not a shell like bash or fish. This shell is actually written in Emacs lisp and you can configure it using Emacs list. You can create custom EMAC functions that would run inside the eShell. Kind of a neat little shell. So let's go ahead and add this to my config. So let me spacefr for find recent file and let's go to my config.el. And the very last line here if I uncomment it is another we're setting a variable, right? uh set q initial buffer choice is the variable and this could be whatever you want that initial buffer to be in this case I want the initial buffer choice to be I want you to run the eh shell program so that's what the uh single quote and then eh shell you know that's run that program and now that I've done that if I space QR to just you know quit out of Doom EMAC and then restart it is what it's supposed to do supposed to restart the Damon I don't know it actually did restart the Damon I don't think it did uh Uh let's go ahead. I'll do it at the terminal. Kill all Emacs. Then I will manually restart the Damon. It looks like it has to install some EShell stuff. Okay. And now when I do my keybinding to launch Emacs, it should launch us into the EShell. It did not. Now why did it not launch me into the ESHell as the initial uh buffer choice? This because Doom has one of its custom configs. So if I do space FP for find the private files other than config.el Eel probably the most important config file for Doom Emacs is the anit.el. So let's go into it. You will remember this where you have all these lines that you comment or uncomment depending on whether you want to turn off the default modules or not. So for me, Doom dashboard right here. No, we actually we're on that line. So just comment out the Doom dashboard program. And now let's write and quit. And if I well let me go ahead and space hrrrr to reload. And now if I kill that window and restart Doom EMAC now my initial buffer choice anytime I launch Emacs will be the eShell. So I'm already in the eShell if I want to do a shell command which again most of the time and I won't say most of the time but a good percentage of the time I want a terminal anyway. So this is good to have as an initial buffer choice if you spend a lot of time at the shell. Anyway, one final thing I want to do is I do want to convert my config.l over into an org document because Emacs you can configure using org rather than Emacs list as far as you can do a literate config. So you can write a org document with a table of contents and you know tables of key bodies you know it can be a proper it can be the source code and it can be the documentation uh for the source code all in one document. It's really neat. So, I want to convert my config.l over into a config.org. How do we do that? Well, let's space FP for find private files. Let's go into a nit.l. One of the modules should be turning on literate config right here. Config. Let's uncomment that. So, turn on the literate config. Let's write that. Space HR. And now, it may complain. And yeah, it's going to give an error because I don't have a config.org yet. But that's fine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back into DoomX and let's create a config.org. So, let me do a space period for find file and let me navigate into config /doom slash and then there's no config.org. Let's just create one. Let's config.org. And here you go. And then what we need to do is inside this document. The easiest way to get started is do the less than sign. So the uh the left pointing chevron and then s for source block and hit tab. And you get these two uh tags, the beginning tag and the ending tag for source. You need to tell it what language you're writing in. So let's do emac-l. And now anything inside this source code block will be interpreted as emacs list code. And by default everything in a config.org file will get written to config.elel unless you specify it to write it somewhere else. So now let me open a second window and let's go to the config.ele. And all I really need to do is just take all the code here. So, let me get into visual line mode. And we're just going to copy the entire document. And I'm going to put it inside this block. And now let's go ahead and write that. And then let's go ahead write and quit. And then going to open a terminal once again. Kill all Emacs. Let's restart the Damon and see if we get any errors. Everything looks good. And now, you know, we can configure Emacs now just using our config.org file. and to clean this up a little bit. I mean, there's a lot of comments here for people that are new to Doom Max. Uh, and maybe some of these comments are appropriate to keep, but for me, you know, I think I'm just going to delete most of the comments. I'll add comments back in on my own later. But a large block of comments for some stuff here, for example, this huge block of comments. I'm just going to get rid of all of that just to make it a little easier. So, you can see we're not dealing with much stuff here. So the first thing I want to do, let's go ahead and create a couple of different source blocks. So let's go ahead and create another Emacs list source block. And let's have one specifically for Doom stuff. So how about just Doom settings? So stuff that is specific to your Doom config. So that would include things. For example, I think the Doom theme makes sense for that header, right? So, we'll have that and we could probably add the font as well. So, I think these make sense. You got your setting the theme, setting the font, and then the next source code block I think should be org stuff, right? Just because I'm already there. So, let's make this a tople header and title it or this block will have our org level headers, right? And I think we should probably add all of this org stuff. So all the uh setting the org directory org modern table. So let's move this up up here and then let's go ahead and create another source code blob emac lisp and then everything that is not org related I'm just going to go ahead and put in this block. We'll get rid of these comments as well. And for now I'm just going to put the title other stuff here. Right. So this is what an org document looks like. You make an outline. So you know only the stuff inside the source code blocks gets written to config.el. So your headers they get ignored. They don't get written to config.el. This is just for people reading the document. You know people can see this block has something to do with org mode. This block has something to do with Doom settings. This block has something to do with the eh shell. this block has something to do with key bindings, whatever it happens to be. And of course, this document is going to become a rather lengthy document as I go forward in the coming weeks and configure it. So, we're going to need at some point a proper table of contents. Let's go ahead and create it now. Uh even though this document is not very lengthy yet. So, first thing you need to do go to the top of the document, create a top level header, call it table of contents, and then give it this tag. So, colon to Oc colon is a tag in Emacs. And now Emacs knows this is supposed to be a table of contents. Let's write that. And when you write it, all of your top level headers, they're here listed under the table of contents. And this will automatically get changed and you repopulated as I add more headers along the way. As I customize this, the table of contents takes care of itself. And as this becomes a gigantic file, it becomes really easy to navigate the document just going to the table of contents, for example, and using your mouse and just clicking on something like other stuff and I'm immediately there. This was a thousand lines long. You know, that would be a quick way to get to the end of the document. So, there you have it. My current Doom EMAC config. Still in the beginning stages of it. I'm going to push that, by the way, over to my GitLab for those of you that are following along and want this rather basic config. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Matt Steve, 40 millimeter, Capcake Man, Darloff, Lee, Jersey Killer, Mark, Methos, Uran Paul, Peace, Arch of Door, Reality for Less, Red Profit, Roland War, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at DoomX would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. Without these guys, I couldn't do what I do. I depend on you guys, the community, for supporting the channel. If you like my work and want to support what I do here, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.