_     _         _   _                _ _ _ 
| |   (_) ___   | \ | | _____   _____| | (_)
| |   | |/ _ \  |  \| |/ _ \ \ / / _ \ | | |
| |___| | (_) | | |\  | (_) \ V /  __/ | | |
|_____|_|\___/  |_| \_|\___/ \_/ \___|_|_|_|
                                            

                 _             _   
  ___ ___  _ __ | |_ __ _  ___| |_ 
 / __/ _ \| '_ \| __/ _` |/ __| __|
| (_| (_) | | | | || (_| | (__| |_ 
 \___\___/|_| |_|\__\__,_|\___|\__|
                                   
    

 _     _             
| |__ | | ___   __ _ 
| '_ \| |/ _ \ / _` |
| |_) | | (_) | (_| |
|_.__/|_|\___/ \__, |
               |___/ 
    

People of Emacs

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our local Emacs User Group Slovenia, but first I'll quickly mention some "international" Emacs users who have influenced me.

I'll start with Xah Lee. I explored his website, particularly the sections on Emacs and keyboards. As a DIY keyboard enthusiast, I first saw the Ergodox on his site. However, I distanced myself after I disagreed with his world view expressed in his Twitter posts.

My highest praise goes to Sacha Chua. I've been following her Emacs news since I started using Emacs, which is now inevitably coming to the end of a second decade. I was thrilled when she randomly joined our Emacs User Group Slovenia online meeting on IRC. We spoke about Transcription mode, which I used to help my partner with conversation analysis. Sacha was also a guest on my tech-critical radio show Techno Enema :), and I often quote her remark about being unsure whether her kid will be a Vim user: "you know how kids are these days." It was amazing to see her pipe automatic speech transcription into Emacs with CRDT running on my server.

Another guest in my radio show was Christine Lemmer-Webber with whom we had a wonderful conversation about Emacs at the first Copyleft conference in 2019 in Brussels. I hope I'll be able to dive into the Goblins project she works on.

David Wilson is another person I look up to. I built my static Org export website based on his System Crafters tutorial. I'd also love to join his Guile course, but I currently can't find the time.

I'd also like to mention the Guix community. I've attended GNU Guix Days, the unconference about the Guix operating system. Even though there were no explicit—or at least not frequent—Emacs mentions, I believe the overlap is significant. There's an Emacs package called guix.el that handles operating system management. At Guix Days, I met Adam McCartney, a composer turned HPC administrator. I later met him for coffee in Vienna, where he told me his best days at work are when he spends a lot of time configuring Emacs (I hope he doesn't get into trouble for that).

Finally, I come to our small Emacs User Group Slovenia community. It was started by Jan Prunk in 2023 with online meetups. In 2024, I contacted the Central Technical Library in Ljubljana to ask if we could hold our monthly meetings there, and they kindly granted us the space, for which we are very thankful. The core of our community includes Gizmo, with whom I co-host Techno Enema. The show will enter its tenth season in 2026. Before starting the radio show, we once did an episode about text editor flame wars. He was using Vim at the time, and I successfully converted him to the right path.

Owlet of Minerva is a Norwegian religiologist living in Ljubljana. He's our most senior Emacs user, living almost entirely within Emacs—a goal we all aspire toward :). Recently, he became a worg maintainer and also has a static Org export personal homepage. He wrote his own Zotero integration for Emacs and recently built a tool for searching personal Mastodon archives.

Last but not least is Miha. We attended the last Guix Days together. He contributed to our (now slightly stalled) project of a Guix-hosted Emacs with CRDT enabled for collaborative real-time blogging and Org mode project management. Hopefully, we'll come together again to work on it. Maybe we could have a few days of hackathon in summer at my mountain hut—we'll see. Apparently, there are more Emacs users in Ljubljana. I spoke with an AI researcher from the Jožef Stefan Institute who told me many of his colleagues use Emacs and that he'd forward our meeting invitations to them.

And here I'll have to end. If you're visiting Slovenia, feel free to contact any of us, and we can arrange some drinks through our mailing list. See you!

—

My submission to the Emacs Carnival theme of December 2025, The People of Emacs.

 ____  ____ ____      _ 
|  _ \/ ___/ ___|    | |
| |_) \___ \___ \    | |
|  _ < ___) |__) |   | |
|_| \_\____/____/    | |
                     |_|
    

    ____  ____   ____     _ 
   / ___||  _ \ / ___|   | |
   \___ \| |_) | |       | |
    ___) |  _ <| |___    | |
   |____/|_| \_\\____|   | |
                         |_|
    

 ____                    _           _ 
|  _ \  ___  _ __   __ _| |_ ___    | |
| | | |/ _ \| '_ \ / _` | __/ _ \   | |
| |_| | (_) | | | | (_| | ||  __/   | |
|____/ \___/|_| |_|\__,_|\__\___|   | |
                                    |_|
    

    _     _                         
   | |   (_) ___ ___ _ __  ___  ___ 
   | |   | |/ __/ _ \ '_ \/ __|/ _ \
   | |___| | (_|  __/ | | \__ \  __/
   |_____|_|\___\___|_| |_|___/\___|