Sven Guckes Has Died

Very sorry to hear of his passing. Sven Guckes was one of the kind souls on Usenet in the 90s who went out of his way to happily help people with their tech setups. I especially learned quite a lot about Vim and Zsh from him and his rc files which he made available to everyone on his webpage, long before public dotfile repositories on Github were a thing, even before most people in the Unix world knew those tools existed.

Decades later I am still professionally and personally using and benefiting from the tools and lessons he encouraged and helped everyone out with back in the day.

My only regret was that I never got a chance to meet him and thank him in person. The closest I came was at Usenix LISA '11 in Boston when I was speaking at a config management BoF: after the session I was engaged in discussion with a German chap who I later found out was from FU Berlin. It turns out he knew Sven quite well, so I gave him $20 and asked him to give it to Sven to buy some beer on me. A small gesture for the considerable help and advice he had given to people like me.

Rest in peace my friend. You made the world a better place with your kind words and deeds.

Well known by many in the German chaos-sphere. Sven was always out for helping others. Was behind vim.org and you will find more on Sven on http://www.guckes.net/sven/

sven spent the last weeks in a care facility surrounded by his friends who would not stop coming to visit and entertain him with retelling the fun times they had together in the past.

sven kept repeating that he wished that his friends would connect and talk with each other.

there is a project to create a book with stories and experiences about him.

if you have any stories to share, how sven has helped you or something else memorable please post it (or send it to me) and i will forward it.

"Stay in touch! Talk with each other!"

I've met few people with a similar decades of dedication to helping and supporting users, particularly newbies, to work with FOSS. You must have an incredible patience to do that. I never shared that quality, so maybe that made me notice his gift/dedication even more.

After Joerg 'schily' Schilling passing last year, with Sven Guckes another of the "Berlin FOSS old guard" has passed in a rather short amount of time. Both way too young.

RIP, Sven.

Heavily leaned on his gnu-screen config tips & howto's, 15+ years ago. His work probably helped many (judging by how comprehensive his site was). Sorry to hear this. RIP.

FWIW, the next tweet: "Es war kein Covid-Tod" is saying that it WAS NOT a Covid death. In case you see the keyword but don't understand German.

I met Sven Guckes in 2005 at FOSDEM while doing the Lightning Talks, he gave one on mutt-ng.

I stayed on his couch for CCC back in 2005 and 2006.

Bye bye Sven:

https://twitter.com/zoobab/status/1495677697216892928

The first time I got an e-mail from Sven was, when he was scolding me because of an e-mail I sent to the mutt-user mailing list. Sven complained about my horrible English and told me that I have to take more time to edit e-mails before sending them to a public mailing list out of respect to all the readers. Afterwards he helped me with so many things -- as he helped many others. I wrote down some personal memories here: https://k7r.eu/command-line-tool-lover-and-free-software-ent...

Still proud he teached me how to do show "Vim" "eastside/westside style" with my fingers. RIP Sven.

Sven was an outstanding community builder. I met him several times at Linux User Group events and congresses. He connected people old and new, organising so many pre- and post-event gatherings, brunches and so on, that many people got to know each other via Sven. His passion to help new people feel welcome in existing communities certainly helped to grow the Linux and Free Software communities in Berlin, Germany and beyond.

I'm glad to have known him. I just realised that to this day my ~/.vimrc contains settings I once learned in one of his courses (you can find this stuff at https://www.guckes.net/vim/).

R.I.P. Sven.

Sven was a great guy. He lived to help people and he most loved to help people be more productive with CL text tools :-) He never lost his goal and drive and bright attitude, even when he was less than happy to be forced to move due to Berlin's housing price crisis. He's the reason I and a great many people are very happy or even happier tmux and zsh and vim users and I'll never forget the few times he visited us or we visited him.

The world needs more people like him and it's a shame that the world does not take better care of people who give their all to it.

In the early 90's, Sven introduced me and many others at the math and cs campus of the FU Berlin to vim, mutt, screen and zsh. He also was such a passionate activist for freedom with and through (simple) software. Thank you for your dedication and passion for simplicity, Sven, I still choose, use and build such tools, also because of my early experiences through your mentorship back then.

A part of me thinks he just entered Ctrl^a-d.

RIP, Sven

obituaries:

https://martin.leyrer.priv.at/y2022/m02/Remember-Be_more_lik...

https://sebstein.hpfsc.de/2022/02/21/mach-es-gut-sven-guckes...

https://www.heise.de/news/Vim-Versteher-und-Kommandozeilener...

:'( This is heartbreaking

What a loss :/

my .vimrc is originally from him, it still says:

> " Last update: Thu Dec 10 02:02:02 CET 1998

thank you so much sven! r.i.p.

> born April 6th, 1967

RIP :(

RIP

RIP

RIP Sven!