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RMS Steps Down As Emacs Maintainer

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the evangelism-is-time-consuming dept.

sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."

11 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Re:More time to work on HURD? by smittyoneeach · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can actually use it right now:
    http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  2. Re:Stallman is still around? by buanzo · · Score: 2, Informative

    > Obviously you have never met RMS. I did. More than once. Even had dinner with him (here, in Argentina). And I agree with you. I know what you mean.

    --
    Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
  3. Re:Stallman is still around? by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Informative

    ever tried to get line numbers on that thing?
    Sip from the fountain of wisdom...http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki
    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  4. No, the GP was referring to the emacs shrink by smittyoneeach · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here is a transcript:
    Me: Every release since 19.34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud.
    Emacs: What would happen if 19 34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud?
    Me: MULE was probably the worst offender.
    Emacs: Why do you say mule was probably the worst offender?
    Me: Such a fat jackass, that MULE.
    Emacs: Can you elaborate on that?

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  5. Re:Wow by vga_init · · Score: 2, Informative

    You may not know this, but RMS actually speaks Spanish.

  6. Re:Stallman is still around? by reav · · Score: 2, Informative

    great point "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers." rms is a true American hero.

  7. editing LaTeX under Emacs by porky_pig_jr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Jokes aside, after trying many free and commercial LaTeX editors, I ended up running Auctex under Emacs. Beats anything else. That's my main usage of Emacs (and I use LaTeX a lot, to typeset math staff).

  8. Re:May His Next Adventure Be Twice as Fruitfull by pthisis · · Score: 2, Informative

    For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.

    Or go with the XEmacs fork, which supports real bitmaps (and has been maintained without RMS for years).

    --
    rage, rage against the dying of the light
  9. Re:That joke was old when I was in school by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Short answer: pick up or print out a copy of PCL. It's the best general-purpose Common Lisp book of the past 5 or 10 years.

    Long answer: it depends on what you're a beginner at.

    If you're a beginner at Lisp, but know how to program, then SLIME is not bad. At the very least, it adds handy things like syntax highlighting and completion to SBCL. Get a good book (like PCL) and you're all set.

    If you're also a complete beginner at using Emacs, or at programming, it may be too much. Learning two (or more) deep subjects at once is often a recipe for frustration.

    But PCL uses Lisp-in-a-Box, which includes Emacs and SLIME, so it can't be *that* hard, and the book steps you through the easy things you need to know.

  10. Re:Emacs bloat by Wolfbone · · Score: 2, Informative

    You could switch them off by putting "(menu-bar-mode -1)" and "(tool-bar-mode -1)" in your .emacs file. Alternatively, you could put "Emacs.menuBar: off" etc. in your .Xresources or similar file if you're using X. All this stuff is in the Emacs documentation.

  11. Re:Stallman is still around? by pimpimpim · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time, but also some noblemen had their own libraries . The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all). In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all the way to the place the book was located, pay for travelling expenses, and/or a weaponed guard if you wanted to loan the book over to your place. Also understand that copying the book would take a long long time, which means a very costly and slow way of knowledge movement. Gutenberg's invention did help bringing books out of the elitist circle, if not for my arguments above, then just for the sake of the economy of bulk products.

    --
    molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling