Emacs gets new maintainer as Richard Stallman signs off

Long-time contributor to Emacs and author of Emacs Muse John Wiegley has assumed the role of maintainer of the project. Promising an official announcement "soon", Wiegley said he'd accepted the role after a meeting with Richard Stallman: "Richard and I met at MIT yesterday, where I officially accepted the role as maintainer …

[bazza]

EMACS...

Yeurk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard found an alternative

He recently had an offer from Microsoft to work on the next version of Word... had a quick look at the interfaces and jumped ship immediately..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bloody Emacs...

"What's wrong with vi?"

It was the awfulness of vi that drove into the arms of emacs.

[lurker]

Re: Bloody Emacs...

Emacs a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.

:wq!

[tojb]

overdue for el-reg integration

M-X pull-next-article elreg

M-X spaff-comment elreg

M-X doctor

[Alan Mackenzie]

RMS wasn't the maintainer, hasn't been for around a decade.

I'm afraid you've got it wrong, Reg.

The previous maintainer of Emacs was Stefan Monnier, who did a tremendous job. He stepped down from the maintainership on 21st September, after single-handedly managing this complex project for several years since his co-maintainer bowed out.

It's worth mentioning that John Wiegley, the new maintainer, has not up till now been prominent in the core Emacs project, but has contributed to external packages. He commands the respect of the current Emacs contributors.

[caffeine addict]

"once we dot the i's and cross the t's"

Isn't there a key combination for that...?

[William Towle]

> "once we dot the i's and cross the t's"

> Isn't there a key combination for that...?

M-x tittle-tattle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a fan

Any usable software old enough to have "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" as an insult must be alright.

[phil dude]

hang on...

I had cause to use Emacs just last week...

I had to indent some Fortran and C using the pretty faces for publication.

But it spits out nice postscript, which is every so easy to manipulate.

If your office has a plotter, you can print source code in 5-6 columns on the side, formatted however you want... wall of code?

Viva Emacs

P.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh

I tried Emacs years ago. I probably could have used it eventually, but I would have needed to break both of my little fingers and had them reset to stick out at a 90 degree angle. I swear that Emacs people must type with their hands reversed in order to survive.

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Ugh

I've always been of the opinion that Emacs prodigies have wasted their talent.

Anyone with fingers that nimble could ask any price as a concert pianist!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ugh

The keyboards used by the original emacs developers in the '80s had Meta/Alt and Ctl swapped.

[/dev/null]

Re: Ugh

I think it's no coincidence that RMS did, in fact, suffer from severe RSI.

[Richard Stallman]

From Richard Stallman

As the leader or "Chief GNUisance" of the GNU Project, I appoint the offical maintainers for GNU packages. The maintainers of a package are in charge of the work on it, and often organize contribution by others.

However, it has been many years since I myself was the maintainer of GNU Emacs. The previous official maintainer of GNU Emacs was Stefan Monnier, who recently resigned after many years of good work.

I wrote GNU Emacs as part of the free operating system GNU, begun in 1984. The last major gap in GNU, the kernel, was filled in 1992 when Torvalds freed his kernel, Linux.

Dr Richard Stallman

President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)

Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)

MacArthur Fellow

[Driver's Door]

EMACS development?

Egads, what possible development would it need? I would have thought that development was finished more than 2 decades ago. I used it briefly in the 80's only because it ran on the four different systems that I was using at the time. There was a pair of systems in which the key strokes for cursor movement for one system's editor did delete functions on the editor of the other system. I was constantly deleting things at the wrong time & if I remember correctly the editor that deleted stuff instead of moving the cursor did not have an undo function. What was Stallman doing, modifying EMACS until it became an entire operating system?