Emacs Carnival: The people of Emacs

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

The people of Emacs - it's a thought-provoking prompt for me, because, on reflection, it is surprising how few people I know from the Emacs community on a personal level. Particarly given how much of my daily work and life is mediated by Emacs. 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. That's died down a bit (certainly from my side as life happens). But finding your people of Emacs via something that you use most regularly and know most about is a good approach.

I suppose, though, itis also worth reflecting: why? Why be part of the community? Why be amongst the people of Emacs? It's just a piece of software, right? Well, for me it goes something like this:

• Libre software is a great example of commoning and of digital ecosocialism.
• Ergo: libre software is a good thing.
• 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.
• Ergo: 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 uses Neovim (I think).
• Christine Lemmer-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. It really is 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!

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!