Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs) | Hacker News Reader

Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs)

wenshanren.org

130 pointsMeatball_py82 comments

Neal Stephenson is missing from this list: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NealStephenson

And Vernor Vinge (http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...).

Eben Moglen is also not there - sure he's now a Stallman collaborator and involved with the FSF, but he is 'just' a lawyer and/or law professor - yet in one of his earliest contacts with RMS, he apparently already claimed to use emacs every day.

Whitfield Diffie is also an Emacs user. I once sat behind him at an awards ceremony and was able to observe him hacking on Emacs lisp during the event. That was the highlight of my month.

What does hacking ON Emacs lisp mean? Does it mean working on Emacs's lisp interpreter's source? Or on some project written in Emacs lisp?

For me it means writing an .el extension.

Yes. After the event was over, I asked him what he had been working on, it was some code to identify what sort of buffer he had just opened (secure v. insecure, I don't remember the details)

I would call that hacking in Elisp, not on Elisp, which is why I asked.

Yes, that's exactly what he was doing when one time I approached him to sign my copy of his book!

Neal Stephenson is in the original list, but he is switched to Scrivener now. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-steph...

Josh Nimoy, because he uses emacs and got it into Tron http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

Somehow missed that. I love how many geekster eggs were in that movie!

Speaking of sf/fantasy authors, Steve Brust writes using emacs.

(And on mandrake linux, according to the acknowledgements of this unpublished work: http://dreamcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/My-Own-Kind-...)

Jack Chalker sited Framemaker and Borland Sprint as favorites because of their EMACS-like features: http://web.archive.org/web/19990819062835/http://jackchalker...

Sprint's a real member of the EMACS family tree but I don't know about Framemaker.

Yes I saw in the foreword/afterword in one of his recent books a credit for somebody helping him with Emacs Macros.

I was disappointed we didn't know what kind of macros they were.

Also, Ken Jennings writes his weekly trivia challenge in Emacs:

http://www.ken-jennings.com/messageboards/viewtopic.php?p=12...

That's maybe not the ideal endorsement, though. Ken is a great guy, but having the trivia champion of the world saying he is an enthusiastic Emacs user... well, it doesn't improve Emacs' reputation as an editor for lovers of the esoteric.

> Richard Stallman – the creator of GNU Emacs, the founder of GNU

Did anybody think he was secretly using vi in the closet?

I still think he is. He's too productive not to be.

It's probably a lot easier to learn emacs when you implement it.

RMS hasn't built anything in ages! (As far as I know.)

By "build" if you meant RMS stopped coding ages ago then you are wrong. He still contributes quite a lot to Emacs (https://github.com/mirrors/emacs/commits/master)

I am pretty sure I can dig up other projects he is still coding in. but RMS hasn't stopped coding.

I meant new projects. I just wouldn't describe him as "too productive" now, not compared to the early days. Unlike that other lovable teddy bear, Linus. RMS has even written about his shift out of development IIRC, about how political work is more important to him now.

Linus frequently talks about how all he does these days is merge stuff with very little coding of his own.

Yes, but he has to read a LOT more code (arguably the important part of programming) than you or I on a daily basis.

How are RMS & JWZ not famous for using emacs? I was expecting more people outside of the usual computer science & industry suspects.

I agree, several of those people are famous in large part because of their contributions to Emacs.

Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)? I didn't know he had anything to do with Emacs until I Googled to see what that was about.

> Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)?

Depends on when you were born.

Or what you've read. I first met Zawinski through Coders at Work and he immediately became my hero. Working on Lucid/XEmacs was but one reason why.

I find it strange that Daniel Weinreb, Guy Steele and Richard Stallman are on this list. Steele co-wrote ?macs with David Moon and John Kulp. Dan Weinreb was a beta tester on ?macs before Stallman joined the project, and he would later become the first one to write an Emacs in a lisp (EINE). Stallman, of course, created GNU Emacs. Putting them on a list with Assange and Zuckerberg is ridiculous.

It's a list of people who are (1) famous AND (2) Emacs users AND who would still be famous if they were not Emacs users. Weinreb, Steele, and Stallman all fit this.

Also, you make it sound like Stallman wasn't involved in Emacs from the start. In fact, Stallman and Steele wrote the FIRST Emacs. Everyone else you named came after.

The E in Emacs was contributed by Stallman, this was when he had already joined the project. Previously, the project had another name and other hackers were involved.

"Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention.

"He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele.

For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it.

"As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.

The project's new name, Emacs, came courtesy of Stallman.[1]

I think Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel, also talks a little about this in one of the interviews.

[1] Free as in Freedom

Many of the "programmer heavies" at MS used Epsilon (an Emacs clone with quite good Windows integration). To be fair, a lot of them also used vim. Notably, few of them liked Visual Studio all that much.

Maybe that's why previous versions of Visual Studio came with Emacs keybindings by default?

Unfortunately, the latest VS is missing those.

What's funny is that none of these people are actually working software engineers, at least anymore. Even Linus doesn't write much code. Perhaps that's a consequence of being famous, or necessary to be famous. But it also allows the counter-argument that Emacs has been supplanted by newer editors by active practitioners.

Not famous. Because they are managers or otherwise in senior roles.

This is mostly news because of RMS' photo without a beard :D

I never saw a picture of Stallman so young.

There are videos on youtube from his early carrier - with a beard but looking young as well.

Does anybody has the same list with vi?

Vim not vi.

Or does anyone actually use vi?

> Or does anyone actually use vi?

Folks working on machines without vim who don't have root.

Source: an 18 month consulting gig several years ago.

They usually have one of the many clones of vi, installed as vi. Very few use actual vi, because for many years it was out-of-bounds because it used AT&T code from ed.

Yeah, I meant whatever generic vi-alike is installed instead of vim.

Interesting. What's the easiest way to check which vi binary I have?

  $ update-alternatives --display vi
  vi - auto mode
    link currently points to /usr/bin/vim.gtk
  ...

Or you could brute force it:

  $ ll $(which vi)
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 May 16 17:14 /usr/bin/vi -> /etc/alternatives/vi*
  $ ll /etc/alternatives/vi
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 17 06:07 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/vim.gtk*
  $ ll /usr/bin/vim.gtk 
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2391176 Apr  2 03:18 /usr/bin/vim.gtk*

vim.gtk is likely coded to behave differently depending on how it was invoked, as vim or vi for example.

Well, if you have SSH access, you could just edit those files with Emacs anyway. It has support for remote files (via TRAMP) out of the box.

Or just FUSE + sshfs, and any editor that you have locally. :-P

Well, sure, but then I'd just use vim like a sane person.

I encounter vi on a production Solaris 10 box at my current consulting gig.

I can access the box from other hosts with tramp. I believe that firewall rules will be changed to restrict many production SSH connections to be outbound, which might signal the end of that use case(?)

Other editors found on the production box: ed, xedit (X Consortium).

Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html

Interesting, I never knew this. I guess I just assumed that all the famous lisp hackers automatically were emacs users.

I wrote "Vim", then edited my comment to make it generic: vi, Vim, elvis, nvi, etc.

Most Famous: The hacker from http://books.google.com/books/about/CUCKOO_S_EGG.html?id=0q1... hahaha.

Sadly, Dan Weinreb died almost a year ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Weinreb

Could someone explain what program Mark used in The Social Network movie when he was viewing the traffic for facemash.com? I've never seen that kind of clean logging before - at least not for php/apache. http://i0.wp.com/wenshanren.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/w...

I wonder what Linux distribution he used.

Even though Linus is on this list, it is for using MicroEMACS, which is really not very close to Emacs. Same keybindings, yes, but significantly smaller editor. Certainly less powerful than most any version of VI.

I have MicroEMACS running on my HP200lx.

Disclaimer: I worked with Dave Conroy, the author of MicroEMACS for a short while.

Decently surprising list, at least for me. I think the Torvalds-Stallman relationship got more complicated in my head.

To be fair, Linus uses uemacs. He says "real" emacs is the tool of the devil ;-)

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/iySKQGtkmtb

And the last line of the last commit to his uemacs repo is, "I really should just learn another editor, rather than continue to polish this turd."

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/diff/?i...

You mean the last line of the commit message, at http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/commit/.... Your link just shows the code diff.

I'm happy to use Emacs. I'm also perfectly comfortable to personally and professionally dislike RMS.

>I'm also perfectly comfortable to personally and professionally dislike RMS.

Why?

You do know of course, the innocent spirit of this dear man was traumatized at MIT's lab due to closed source proprietary commercializing --before, but around the time of-- Symbolics grabbing and zipping up Macsyma, or, ...something like that?

James Gosling still uses Emacs?

Ooops http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_ema...

He proposes NetBeans over Emacs. I can understand this, if you want to write Java code (I prefer Eclipse [which of course has Emacs keybindings], but that is another issue).

But NetBeans for anything but Java? I don't think so.

"While NetBeans is open source, Gosling said almost nobody bothers to modify its code because of its complexity."

Isn't this terrible for an Open Source project? Emacs still has tons of commits by various developers. Is there at least a healthy community producing plugins for NetBeans?

Many of them are famous Lisp programmers. Of course, Lisp grogrammers use Emacs.

Mostly; Paul Graham being an exception.

Is there a list of emacs users who are famous for using emacs?

Steve Yegge?

There is a list on the EmacsWiki

very confusing title

Aaaaaaah. Social Proof.

:-)

Sadly the amount of resource to learn emacs is pretty sparse while it is not for vim.

Also emacs doesn't run properly on windows (at least not on an azerty keyboard)

Not one of your statements are true. In fact, everything you just said is 100% bullshit.

Well those are my problems, I've been trying to get into Emacs for a pretty long time and have no gave up to use Sublime. But if I'm in a terminal I'll use Emacs, inefficiently but this is my go to.

Hello,

I run the blog mastering emacs - please let me know if there are any articles you want me to cover.

how to run emacs with an azerty keyboard on windows would be one :)

how is it not possible to run emacs with azerty keyboard? is there something preventing you from starting emacs? or some key efficiency issue??

The problem clearly exists between the chair and the keyboard...

all the shortcuts change, some don't work anymore.

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