I want a file manager to appear on the side of the screen when I open emacs, like you would have in gedit or atom. I am open to using any package or plugin as long as you can tell me what to put in my init file to make it open when I start emacs.

In many programming tasks it is helpful to be able to write log messages or display alerts to see what code is executing. I am having a bit of trouble with my emacs init file and I was wondering if there was some way to write some sort of log messages from it.