WEBVTT
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Hello, my name is Gabriele,
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and today I'm going to tell you about Telega
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and the Emacs community on Telegram.
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I'm not affiliated with Telegram or Telega,
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and opinions are my own in general.
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I'm going to give you my personal spin about these topics.
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The plan for the talk is the following.
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First, I'm going to talk about what is Telegram.
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Next, I'm going to tell you
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about the Emacs community on Telegram.
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And finally, I'm going to discuss telega.el,
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an Emacs package for Telegram.
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In all of these, I'm now going to dive into details.
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My goal here is to give you
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some exposure about these topics.
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You can find out more online, if you want.
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Let's get started with what is
Telegram.
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Telegram is a cloud-based
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instant messaging platform.
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It's a popular one.
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It has more than half a billion users.
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I think one of the reasons
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why it's so popular, it's because
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it's really rich in features
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while being user friendly.
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Hence, in some regions,
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Telegram has good market penetration.
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And of course, because of network effects,
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this brings even more users.
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The details of the features
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is not particularly important.
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What i want to emphasize, though,
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is that while telegram is mostly text-based
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there's also support for audio/video calls and notes,
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and there's also a lot of features
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which typically you find
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in other instant messaging platforms:
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you can chat with yourself,
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you can make polls,
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you can make quizzes,
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you can schedule messages,
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you can send attachments of any kind,
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even big ones, and you can send stickers.
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Telegram, overall, is quite customizable,
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and I would say that the platform is, overall, hackable.
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You can expand it with bots
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and the clients are open source.
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In all of this, we shouldn't forget, though,
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the Telegram is centralized
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and it is not free software.
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Nonetheless, it's still used by a number of people,
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and people use telegram for different reasons.
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For example, some people use it to stay in touch
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with friends and families.
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For this, Telegram offers private chats
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or group chats with a restricted number of people.
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A lot of people use it
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for engaging in online communities.
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For this, Telegram has super groups,
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which are groups with up to
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hundreds of thousands of users,
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and has also channels,
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which are one-to-many ways of communicating,
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so these are ideally suited for,
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for example, following news,
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all sorts of news.
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Telegram also has bots
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which can be useful by themselves.
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They provide value.
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And the chat with oneself
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can be used for sending links,
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making notes, or sending reminders.
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So overall, there's multiple ways
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in which you can use telegram.
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When it comes to instant messaging,
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many people call Telegram home.
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It shouldn't come as a surprise, then,
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that Emacs users want to
meet
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on Telegram as well.
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And indeed, there's an Emacs community on Telegram.
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Here I'm listing a few super groups
about Emacs.
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There are language groups,
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so there's Emacs English, Emacs Russian,
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Emacs Spanish, Emacs Mandarin, Portuguese...
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There are groups which are specific to starter packs.
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For example, there are Doom Emacs,
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Spacemacs, and there are groups
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which are specific to packages like telega
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which I'm going to discuss later.
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These are what you would expect
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from traditional internet chat rooms.
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So they're used for shared links,
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they're used for discussing, troubleshooting,
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giving each other recommendations...
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I think there are healthy communities
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with typically a hundred
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to a thousand members.
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An example of an initiative that's put forth
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by the Emacs community on Telegram
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is @emacs_stories. @emacs_stories
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collects links and messages and pictures
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that can showcase what Emacs can do.
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One of the goals here is
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to show people that are new to emacs
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what you can achieve
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if you spend time with your editor.
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And here, what I'm showing you
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is a screenshot from Telega.
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So let's move on to the final topic
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of this discussion,
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which is telega.el.
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Telega is a terrific piece of software.
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Telega is a interface to telegram within Emacs.
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It's developed by @zevlg,
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which is a long-time Emacs hacker,
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and it's very actively developed.
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Telegram itself is under active development,
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and telega has to implement
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all these new features
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that Telegram implements.
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Indeed, Telega implements
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almost all the features
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available in Telegram,
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even things like live location,
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except for audio/video calls
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but these are work in progress.
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Just to give you an idea
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of the size of this effort,
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we're talking about
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30,000 lines of code,
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which doesn't tell you much,
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but maybe you can get a sense
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that this is a significant project.
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In fact, I think Telega is a really remarkable
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piece of software.
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Not only it implements all the features
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available in Telegram,
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but implements new ones,
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which are only available to Emacs users.
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Here I'm blinking the documentation
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for you to read if you're interested.
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What I want to mention, though,
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is that Telega is available on MELPA,
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but it requires an external library, TDlib.
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Most distributions do not pack
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a recent version of TDlib.
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Such you have to compile yourself.
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if you don't want to compile TDlib,
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you can use the officially supported
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Dockerfile or guix file
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so that you can get everything
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without too much worry.
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Now let me tell you more about Telegram.
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Of course, the best way is to just
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experiment with it yourself.
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And here I just want to give you
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a glimpse of how Telega works.
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When you start Telega,
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what you see is a root buffer.
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The root buffer is essentially
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the list of all the chats that you have,
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and, by itself, is a really powerful tool.
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You can use it for sorting
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and filtering your chats,
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or you can create groups which are thematic.
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There's sophisticated search functions.
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For example, if you want to search only
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for specific type of media,
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you can start new chats,
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you can get info about the chats,
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and you can even change Telegram settings
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which are applied across the board.
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Here I'm showing you an example
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of what it looks like.
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As you see, we're enjoying the support for emoji
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that Emacs has been improving upon
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over the past years.
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Once you select one of these charts,
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you're brought to the chat buffer.
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Here I'm showing an example of
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what a chat buffer looks like.
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So this is a screenshot
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from the Emacs English group
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where people were discussing about
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compiling Emacs.
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As you can see, we see the conversation.
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We see the avatars.
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We see that there's a thread.
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We also see that
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I'm going to send a message,
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message with emoji,
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a message with formatting,
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and I'm attaching an object.
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I can format my messages
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using Markdown or Org Mode
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or whatever I prefer
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and I can attach any kind of attachment
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I like. For example...
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What I can also do is,
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if I'm editing a buffer,
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I can send that buffer through Telega,
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which I find quite useful
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especially when I'm sending code.
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And again, just to show you that
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Telegram is not just text messages
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and Telega supports all the features in Telegram,
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here at the bottom, I'm showing
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a voice note being played through Emacs,
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and as you see, there are some buttons
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which are functional.
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If I hit the two times button,
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the playback speed will be twice,
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which is really neat.
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Telega and Emacs can even
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reproduce videos or gifs,
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at least for a recent version of Emacs.
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Finally, I want to emphasize that Telega
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integrates really well with Emacs.
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For example, we are showing you
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how you can use a transient interface
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to Telega, or on the other side,
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I'm showing you how Telega integrates
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with dashboard,
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so that we have recent chats
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and we have the Emacs stories.
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Because, you know,
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who doesn't like Emacs with stories.
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On top, on the other hand,
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I'm showing you that we can have
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syntax highlighting,
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which is something that Telegram by itself
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doesn't have, this Emacs-only feature,
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and we can edit this
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in the same way we edit
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Org Mode source blocks,
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so we can edit this
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with the minor mode for,
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in this case, Emacs Lisp.
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So, to conclude, I wanted to show you
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that the Emacs community
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also meets on Telegram,
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and we're an active and healthy community,
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and I want to present Telega
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as a really amazing piece of software,
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one of the best clients available for
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Telegram with Emacs.
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Even if you don't use Telegram,
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I think you should have a look at Telega
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just to appreciate how amazing
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a piece of software it is.
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And with this, I thank you for your attention,
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and if you like Telega,
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please consider donating
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to support the development of the package.
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Thanks.
