I don’t think using Emacs could make a better programmer, nor do I think that having a couple of relatively famous middle or old aged people using (or previously using) Emacs could prove that Emacs has some unique power.

However, when I started, there were a few Emacs users that I have high respect for, which is one of the reasons that made me continue to play with Emacs. Here I have created a list of famous Emacs users and hope it will (mis)guide newbies.

This list will be updated occasionally (the latest updates will be on the top) and revision is highly welcomed.

Rich Hickey – the creator of Clojure Rich Hickey programmed in Emacs during his talks, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KqUvG8HPYo

Jonathan Blow – the author of game Braid

Note: this picture is from gamefans.com Jonathan Blow has a few series of living coding, where he used Emacs for programming.

Wang Yong – ex CTO of Deepin Linux

Note: this picture is from deepin.org Wang Yong is the author of many widely adopted Emacs addons, see his EmacsWiki page for details

Marijn Haverbeke – the author of Eloquent JavaScript and CodeMirror

Note: this picture is from full-frontal.org In one of his comments on hacker news, Marijn mentioned: “I use Emacs for all my coding”

Jeffrey Friedl – the author of Mastering Regular Expressions

Note: this picture is from www.lightroomsecrets.com One of his blog posts is Getting Kanji Working in Emacs

His page on Wikipedia

Michael Widenius – the author of MySQL and MariaDB

Note: this picture is from www.computerweekly.com In The Clash of the DB Egos, Widenius mentioned: “… that was before I switched to Unix and found the best text editor in the world: Emacs”

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Tomas Jonsson for providing information

Joe Armstrong – the creator of Erlang

Note: this picture is from www.computerworld.com.au In The Setup, Joe mentioned: “I write books using XML markup in emacs (nxml mode)” and “I write code in Emacs”

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to 周冲zxc for providing this information.

Amelia Andersdotter – Politician

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia In an interview, Amelia mentioned: “but I do still use Emacs and org-mode.”

Her page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Jisang Yoo for providing information

Steven Brust – the author of Vlad Taltos

Note: this picture is from allaboutcorwin.com In My Own Kind of Freedom , Steven mentioned: “the book was written in emacs on a box running Mandrake Linux”

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to shardling for providing information

Vernor Vinge – the author of True Names and A Fire Upon the Deep, Hugo Award winner

Note: this picture is from www.quotezuki.com In an interview , Vernor showed his working environment and apparently he was writing in Emacs

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Nick Alcock and vihelm_s for providing information

Whitfield Diffie – security expert (Diffie-Hellman key exchange)

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia jf on Hacker News mentioned: “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.”

His page on Wikipedia

Note: I couldn’t find any direct evidence to prove that Diffie is an Emacs user

Marc Andreessen – the creator of the Mosaic browser and the founder of Netscape

Note this picture is from www.forbes.com, Marc obviously had more hair when he was younger Marc Andreessen’s page on EmacsWiki

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Xah Lee for providing information

Richard Gabriel – the author of Worse is Better

Note: this picture is from www.dreamsongs.com Gabriel is the founder of Lucid Emacs, see his WikiPage for more details.

Guy Steele – coauthored Scheme with Gerald Jay Sussman

Note: this picture is from thestrangeloop.com Steele is one of the pioneers of Emacs, see his introduction from Coders at Work

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to TheWaWaR for providing information

Peter Norvig – the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Note: this picture is from www.inside.com.tw In this Q&A, Norvig mentioned: “I dislike all three major OS – Windows, Mac, Linux. I like Python and Lisp. Emacs.”

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to TheWaWaR for providing information

Jamie Zawinski – an important programmer of the Mozilla project team

Note: this picture is from www.quotezuki.com One of the most important developers of XEmacs

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Xah Lee for providing information

Daniel Weinreb – cofounder of Symbolics

Note: this picture is from Twitter The late Daniel Weinreb was a pioneer of Lisp and Emacs

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to Xah Lee for providing information

Martin Fowler – coauthor of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Note: this picture is from martinfowler.com In an article on his blog Internal Reprogrammability, Martin mentioned that he is an Emacs user

His page on Wikipedia

Thanks to RomeaWong for providing information

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook founder

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia In the movie Social Network , Mark’s actor was editing PHP and Perl in Emacs, for example:



Note : this picture is from Quora

, Mark’s actor was editing PHP and Perl in Emacs, for example: : this picture is from Quora In one of Mark’s early blogs, he mentioned “it’s definitely necessary to break out emacs and modify that perl script”, this line was also used in the movie’s script.

His page on Wikipedia

Yukihiro Matsumoto – the creator of Ruby

Note: this picture is from www.techcn.com.cn/index.php?doc-view-131413.html Matz’s presentation: How Emacs Changed My Life

On Ruby’s mailing list, Matz replied: “I wrote ruby-mode.el; I live in Emacs; I program in Emacs; I debug in Emacs; I read mails in Emacs; I wrote MUA for Emacs.”

His page on Wikipedia

Guido van Rossum – the creator of Python

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia In his blog I tried PyCharm today, Guido mentioned: “I am mostly an entrenched Emacs user”

His page on Wikipedia

?Linus Torvalds? – the creator of Linux and Git

Note: this picture is from www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia-linux/ In a post on his Google+ , Linus mentioned that his primary editor is uemacs

uemacs can be found in the Linux repository http://git.kernel.org/cgit/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git

His page on Wikipedia

Note Xah Lee ‘s comment: “Linus 有点不算. uemacs 不像 emacs 那样” (Some might consider not counting Linus on this list due to the differences between uemacs and emacs)

Donald Knuth – the creator of TeX and the author of TAOCP, Turing Award winner

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia A snippet of Elisp code on Knuth’s homepage: color-mode.el

In the Interview with Donald Knuth, he mentioned Emacs for a few times.

His page on Wikipedia

Eric Raymond – the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and How to become a hacker

Note: this picture is from Wikipedia esr contributed a lot to Emacs, see this link for details: http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html

He also coauthored Learning GNU Emacs (O’Reilly)

(O’Reilly) His page on Wikipedia

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

Note: this picture is from www.zeuux.com/group/richardstallman/photo/content/5820 No need for explanation

His page on Wikipedia Note: English is not my first language, so please feel free to point out any mistakes you might find.

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