The People Who Got Me into Emacs

This is my entry to the December Emacs blog Carnival hosted by George Jones this month:

Emacs is the most people-centric technology I’ve ever used. I’m willing to bet that’s true for others as well.

Who are your “People of Emacs”?

Apart from a brief University stint where we used Emacs to write some C code on our SUN terminals, my first year of Emacs was shaped by three people:

  • Sascha Fast, my pal, then-roommate and Zettelkasten partner in crime, who found out about Org Mode and just had to get me on that after a brief experimentation to manage tasks and projects in plain text. Sascha had to force me to even give it a try because I didn’t want to spend time offboarding OmniFocus for projects and TextMate for writing, and now look at me. Look. At. Me. I’m almost a radicalized GNU fanboy who considers switching the daily driver from Mac to Arch Linux.

  • Xah Lee for his Emacs Tutorial – I basically learned all my Emacs Lisp baby steps thanks to his hand-curated manual and reference with examples. I gave his modal input, Xah Fly Keys a try and realized what you could do with key bindings in this weird editor: the single key bindings to move by word or line, and to change the case of the word at point was a huge life-saver when proof-reading Sascha’s book draft. That got me hooked. I’m still on a old version of these bindings. Then I also got into mechanical split-ergo keyboards thanks to his website, upgrading from my Kinesis Freestyle. And during the COVID pandemic lockdown of 2020, I had a lot of fun on his Discord.

  • Sacha Chua for everything on her site including cool Emacs hacks, then Planet Emacslife and Emacs News as the community pulse that sucked me into the weirder things you could do with Emacs. I didn’t know about movie playback and email writing before that. Thanks for this, I guess, now I’m the “everything in Emacs” weirdo :)

Since then, there have been many more. Some through packages, some through writing.

  • Protesilaos Stavrou, whose modus-themes v1 won me over and kept me loyal thanks to the deuteranopia variants.
  • Jeremy Friesen of Take on Rules , Mickey Petersen of masteringemacs.org, Jon Snader of irreal.org, for their blogs, among many others!
  • I, uh, ‘enjoy’ more than 200 use-package expressions in my init file … thanks everyone for sharing your work with the world, as free/libre software, and making Emacs better for all of us.