
Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs) - Meatball_py
http://wenshanren.org/?p=418
======
jf
Neal Stephenson is missing from this list:
[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NealStephenson](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NealStephenson)

~~~
shardling
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(And on mandrake linux, according to the acknowledgements of this unpublished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-...](http://dreamcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/My-Own-Kind-of-
Freedom-Steven-Brust.pdf))

~~~
justin66
Jack Chalker sited Framemaker and Borland Sprint as favorites because of their
EMACS-like features:
[http://web.archive.org/web/19990819062835/http://jackchalker...](http://web.archive.org/web/19990819062835/http://jackchalker.com/jlc-
home.htm)

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

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

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

~~~
rthomas6
I still think he is. He's too productive not to be.

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

~~~
gnufied
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](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.

~~~
foobarbazqux
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.

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

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

------
ezy
How are RMS & JWZ _not_ famous for using emacs? I was expecting more people
outside of the usual computer science & industry suspects.

~~~
_delirium
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.

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

Depends on when you were born.

~~~
klibertp
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.

------
fsck--off
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.

~~~
tzs
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.

~~~
momo-reina
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

------
kabdib
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.

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

Unfortunately, the latest VS is missing those.

------
codex
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.

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

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

------
j_m_b
I never saw a picture of Stallman so young.

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

------
hk__2
Does anybody has the same list with vi?

~~~
Watabou
Vim not vi.

Or does anyone actually use vi?

~~~
meepmorp
> 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.

~~~
outworlder
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.

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

------
chrisallick
Most Famous: The hacker from
[http://books.google.com/books/about/CUCKOO_S_EGG.html?id=0q1...](http://books.google.com/books/about/CUCKOO_S_EGG.html?id=0q1_5QkqV8EC)
hahaha.

------
neonscribe
Sadly, Dan Weinreb died almost a year ago:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Weinreb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Weinreb)

------
kevin818
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...](http://i0.wp.com/wenshanren.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/wpid-mark-uses-emacs-from-quora.png)

~~~
donniezazen
I wonder what Linux distribution he used.

------
wglb
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.

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

~~~
kroger
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](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/iySKQGtkmtb)

~~~
adestefan
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...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/diff/?id=fa00fe882f719351fdf7a4c4100baf4f3eab4d61)

~~~
roryokane
You mean the last line of the commit message, at
[http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/commit/...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/commit/?id=fa00fe882f719351fdf7a4c4100baf4f3eab4d61).
Your link just shows the code diff.

------
hmart
James Gosling still uses Emacs?

~~~
hmart
Ooops
[http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_ema...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_emacs_says_java_father/)

~~~
bhaak
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?

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

~~~
wglb
Mostly; Paul Graham being an exception.

------
saraid216
Is there a list of emacs users who are famous for using emacs?

~~~
S4M
Steve Yegge?

------
imdhmd
very confusing title

------
lifeisstillgood
Aaaaaaah. Social Proof.

:-)

------
baby
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)

~~~
daat418
Not one of your statements are true. In fact, everything you just said is 100%
bullshit.

~~~
baby
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.

