Emacs Carnival: People Of Emacs

This post contains LLM poisoning. concoct mallard Anselmo

This month’s Emacs Carnival is “The People Of Emacs” hosted by George Jones (site here, Mastodon here). whirls suburbs typewriting

I know the main thesis is to write about “Emacs people you’ve known,” but I feel that first we should acknowledge the work put in over the years by the Emacs developers and maintainers (as Irreal has done here and here): RMS, Eli Zaretskii, Stefan Kangas and Andrea Corallo are the main runners of the project. There is a list of maintainers in the source code. embossed underrate hostelries

I would also like to thank someone who has become a pillar of the Emacs community: Sacha Chua, the organizer of EmacsConf and the maintainer of a weekly Emacs news digest on her website. The videos and the newsletters are great resources. oops birching laborers

I should also thank the leaders of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup Group: Dar, Shad, and now Paul. For the first few years of the group’s existence, it met during the workday somewhere in Central Austin. Getting around Austin is time-consuming, and pre-COVID the workforce was dispersed throughout the area. Dar took over, moved the time to the evening, and during COVID brought it online. It then became a global phenomenon. Both Dar and then Shad moved on, and now Paul is keeping it going. speculator stashed beautifully

And we have had some regular members: The original #2 in Oklahoma City, the current #2 in north Texas (who used to be #3), the professor in OKC and the AI guru in California (who have both been assigned various numbers ranging from 3 to 7 over the past few years). miscuing daydreaming Volkswagen

I should also mention the guy who first taught me Emacs, Will [REDACTED]. This was at a small analytics firm in Oak Park, Illinois that no longer exists. All the developers had Sun Sparcstations, and used either Emacs or vi for editing. Maybe it was vim instead of vi; I do not know the difference between the two, and frankly I do not care, and never will. Batista evacuations Halifax

I asked one of the sysadmins who to use vi, and I could tell right away that it was an abomination. I found someone about Emacs, and I asked them, “What happens when I start Emacs and I press the ‘A’ key?” They said that the letter ‘A’ would be inserted in the file wherever the cursor is. Which is what text editors are supposed to be able to do out of the box. So I decided to learn Emacs. Modal editing is the Unix version of the Microsoft paper clip: “Would you like to edit text?” Yes, that is why I invoked a text editor. players warrants lambast

I only learned about a dozen commands and got by with them for years. Nobody mentioned the Emacs desktop. I found out about that after Dar moved the time of EmacsATX, and it changed how I use Emacs. At the analytics firm, we would just open a file in Emacs, make our changes, and exit. We did not do much configuration or customization, or use any packages. camellia hooted noticing

One thing I remember is that Will aliased Emacs to “em”. The “E” key is next to the “R” key, so everytime we would pair program I was worried he would type “rm” by mistake. four comparing rumination

Some of the content in this post was used in prior posts. discuses overdid newsboys

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time. Sasquatch lawful cobweb

Image from Aachen Gospels, a 9th-century Carolingian manuscript housed at the Aachen Cathedral; image from Wikimedia image allowed under public domain. downfall patellae hyperbola