Presentation of the Emacs community outside emacs-devel

[Philippe Vaucher]

Hello,

Richard (maybe Eli too), I think in the past emails you complained
about not having time to know about the Emacs world outside
emacs-devel.

I'll take this opportunity to present you what happens out there, and
the incredible people involved that contribute significantly to make
Emacs the popular editor it is.

Magnars Sven (https://github.com/magnars):

- Author of http://emacsrocks.com, a serie of popular youtube videos
showing how awesome Emacs is. These videos are probably why a large
amount of people "made the switch" to Emacs, either from vim or
SublimeText.
- Author of s.el & dash.el: both libraries used by countless package
authors. Made developing in Emacs "sexy" for a lot of users.
- Author of multiple-cursors.el: multiple cursors editing in Emacs.
Even if not a new idea this was pretty revolutionary and it was soon
highly requested in the vim community who did a similar package.

Jonas Bernoulli (https://github.com/tarsius):

- Main maintainer of magit. Magit is probably one of the main reasons
I'm using Emacs.
- Author of forge, library for interacting with github/gitlab/etc.
- Author of transient, library for presenting interactive popups.

Bozhidar Batsov (https://github.com/bbatsov):

- Author of projectile, a project management library for Emacs. The
most popular project-management library out there.
- Author of CIDER (Clojure Interactive Development Environment).

Steve Purcell (https://github.com/purcell):

- One of the main maintainers of MELPA. Gave countless hours reviewing
packages and enforcing conventions (prefixes, etc).
- Author of exec-path-from-shell, a very used library for OSx Emacs users.

Matus Goljer (https://github.com/Fuco1):

- Author of smartparens (minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens
pairs and tries to be smart about it).
- Auhor of dired-hacks, useful utilities for dired.

Johan Andersson (https://github.com/rejeep):

- Author of f.el (file manipulation api similar to s.el)
- Cask, ecukes (testing)

Vasilij Schneidermann (https://github.com/wasamasa?tab=repositories):

- Author of a lot of useful packages.
- Author of https://emacshorrors.com, a blog reviewing atrocities from
the Emacs source, resulting sometimes in patches.

Tim Visher (https://github.com/timvisher):

- Made Emacs equivalent of "vimgolf" (https://www.vimgolf.com) videos
to show how the same challenges would look in Emacs.

This list is not exhaustive (feel free to enhance it). There are many
more people out there giving countless hours in order to make Emacs
better. I'm sorry for those who are not mentionned, this list is
pretty arbitrary but I have to stop at some point.

Everyone "out there" that uses Emacs a lot knows about these people.
We could maybe say they are "rockstars" of the Emacs "general public"
ecosystem. Those of us who went a bit further and dealt with copyright
assignments and the mailing list also know the "rockstars" of the
mailing list.

With this email my goal is for the "emacs-devel" ecosystem to realise
a bit that a lot is happening outside, and that these people usually
know about you but sometimes it looks like it's not the case the other
way around. I hope I am mistaken and that many of you already know
about these people/libraries and amazing work done out there.

Kind regards,
Philippe