Emacs Carnival: The people of Emacs

The prompt for this December 2025’s [[Emacs Carnival]] is “The People of Emacs”.

It's an thought-provoking prompt for me, because on reflection, given how much of my daily work and life is mediated by Emacs, it is surprising how few people I know from the Emacs community, on a personal level, whether online or in real life. I can count them on one hand. (Barely on one finger…)

I am, however, very aware of the existence of a huge Emacs community. The people making the packages, the config distributions, Emacs itself. And those blogging about it. Within that larger community there's a handful of names I am most aware of because I use their packages or read their posts.

In some sense, the fact the community is so large perhaps makes it harder to make connections. Where do you start? One way is as part of a subcommunity. An area I've made some active contribution before was on the org-roam Discourse group. Find your way in via some part of Emacs that you use most regularly and know most about.

Forming some more active connections in the community can be a goal for 2026. (Maybe regular participation in the blog carnival is one good way of doing that!)

I suppose, though, itis also worth reflecting: why? Why be part of the community? Why be part of the people of Emacs? For me it goes something like this:

• Libre software is a great example of commoning and of digital ecosocialism.
• Emacs is a great example of libre software.
• Ergo, it needs to thrive.
• An active community is part of that thriving.
• For a community to thrive, it needs active members.
• So, be an active member!

Anyway, George's prompt actually specifically says:

The basic ask is to write about “Emacs people you’ve known.” Preference is given to people who influenced you, who inspired you, who taught you, or who bent your mind

I'll list some of those names that I know then, in no special order:

• [[Nathan Schneider]]: A writer whose work I massively respect, and whom wrote that work in Emacs. Though, I'm oddly sad to learn, now seems to use Neovim.
• Christine Webber: ActivityPub author and Spritely leader. Does wild things with Lisp.
• Sacha Chua: Author of Emacs News, an amazing resource, which I read weekly, and is the thing that keeps me most connected to the Emacs community.
• Carsten Dominik, Bastien Guerry, Ihor Radchenko: the maintainers of [[org-mode]] over the years. My life in plain text.
• Jethro Kuan: the original author of [[org-roam]], to which I owe much.
• Nobiot: very active member of the org-roam community.
• [[Daniel]] and [[Panda]]: friends, philosophers and former EvalApply-ers. My only real-life Emacs contacts!