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.
Addendum
I was thinking of the late Thien-Thi Nguyen tonight, and upon searching his name on the web I found out the note I'd shared on info-gnu about his passing was posted in a few other fora, and each time someone shared this beautiful quote by him:
Emacs is the ground. We run around and act silly on top of it, and when we die, may our remnants grace its ongoing incrementation.
I wanted to try and find the original message, which according to the Emacs - Wikiquote page was posted to the comp.emacs newsgroup. I was not able to find an easily accessible copy on the live web, but thanks to the Usenet comp.* archive on the Internet Archive, I was able to find it in comp.emacs.mbox:
From: thi <ttn@netcom.com> Subject: Re: Gtk+ and/or Qt? Or does it matter? Date: 2000/01/24 Message-ID: <m2rya9eh9y6.fsf@netcom9.netcom.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 577292038 Sender: ttn@netcom9.netcom.com References: <m3ya9gg79h.fsf@centauri.ajs.com> Organization: sometimes X-Server-Date: 25 Jan 2000 07:45:54 GMT Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.emacs.xemacs Aaron Sherman <ajs@ajs.com> writes: > Is EMACS going the way of all things? I love EMACS, but it's falling > so far behind that I'm not sure it will make sense for me to keep > using it. I'm constantly jarred by the user-interface which is > inconsistent with everything else on my desktop (as it was back in > version 18 when it took forever to get X support). behind what? emacs is the ground. we run around and act silly on top of it, and when we die, may our remnants grace its ongoing incrementation. "we" can be people, programs, or environments. however, i see your point: quality is in the perception, and thus when you perceive no more use for emacs, it will have died. that is the weay of all things. thi
To me, each commit to Thien-Thi's hideshow package in the GNU Emacs tree is an echo of his presence, and each user and contributor a testament to the time and energy he devoted to enriching the lives of others through the pieces of free software he worked on.
May his memory be evergreen.
bandali, 11 February 2026