Amin Bandali: The People of Emacs

GNU Emacs has been my primary computing environment of choice for over
a decade. Emacs has enabled me to perform a wide array of tasks
involving human and computer languages, such as reading and writing
notes, emails, chats, programs, and more, all in a cohesive and
consistent environment that I can tailor exactly to my needs and
liking.

Coming from a Vim background, I started my Emacs journey trying some
configuration frameworks that provided vi-like key bindings, and after
a few Emacs bankruptcies, ended up with my current homegrown
configuration that I wrote from scratch gradually over the last
7 years, with inspiration from the configurations of some folks who
shared theirs publicly. Though my configuration has been mostly
stable for a few years now and I consciously keep the number of
external packages I use very small, I occasionally add small bits and
pieces to my configuration when I’m inspired after learning about a
neat feature or package on the blogs aggregated on Planet Emacslife,
the messages sent to the Emacs mailing lists, or the videos from the
annual EmacsConf conference.

I like getting a glimpse of other people’s worlds through the lens of
their creative works such as writings, be it prose or Emacs Lisp.
That’s only possible when people share freely, free as in freedom.
I’m thankful to Richard Stallman for his foresight to imbue GNU Emacs
with that freedom from the very beginning and for his lifelong fight
for computer user freedom, and to the many other folks who have joined
the free software movement since then and have fought the good fight.

I’ve been inspired and encouraged by many awesome Emacs people through
the years. People like Corwin Brust with his joyful creative energy
around Emacs and the road to software freedom, Sacha Chua and her
philosophy of leading a life of learning, sharing, and scaling, Gopar
and his enthusiasm for Emacs and its intersection with the Python
world, folks like Protesilaos Stavrou and Greg Farough who discovered
Emacs initially as non-programmers yet were enamoured by its
embodiment of software freedom in practice and went on to integrate it
into their everyday lives, and shoshin of the Cicadas cooperative at
the intersection of humanity and technology sharing his passion for
the human element and community by developing and contributing input
methods for his ancestral language of Lakota to GNU Emacs. I’m deeply
inspired by each of these wonderful people, and grateful for having
known them and for each of their unique perspectives and life stories
with which they have enriched my experience in Emacs and the free
software world.

As wonderful and impactful as Emacs has been in the lives of the many
who have come to know it throughout the decades that it’s been around,
it would not have become what it has been, what it is today, and what
it may become in the future without its community of passionate users
and contributors. The People of Emacs are all of us. Here’s to many
more of us, enjoying many more years of Emacs and software freedom
together even if spread far apart.

Take care, and so long for now.

Inspired by the Emacs Carnival theme for this month,
The People of Emacs. Thanks to George Jones for hosting.

Source: Planet GNU