Sacha Chua has chatted with John Wiegley several times (see here, here, and here). Wiegley’s an interesting guy and all those chats are well worth watching. Recently, as Irreal readers surely know, Wiegley was named the new Emacs maintainer so Chua recorded another session with him.
This is a really interesting chat. They cover two main subjects:
- Wiegley’s workflow as Emacs maintainer
- How Weigley is trying to improve the Emacs community and make it easier for people to contribute
The chat starts with some of the technical means that Wiegley uses to stay on top of Emacs development. A large part of that is his use of Gnus to manage the emacs-devel mailing list. As it is, he spends about 2 hours a day reading the list and it would doubtlessly be much more without his leveraging of Gnus to keep the process under control.
In the video, Wiegley shares his screen and shows how he uses Gnus to manage the list. It’s very impressive and a real incentive to suffer through the steep Gnus learning curve if you have similar needs. He also shows how he integrates Org mode into the process. Wiegley says that Gnus and Org are his two main Emacs tools.
On the non-technical side, Wiegley discusses some of his plans for Emacs and how we can all help. He’s changing some of the processes to make contributing easier and allow even those without advanced technical skills to help out. I was struck with how earnest he is in his desire to improve the community. He says that he is currently spending most of his time on these softer issues rather than generating code.
If you’re an Emacser, you really should watch this chat. It will give you a good idea of where Emacs is going and Wiegley’s vision for how we’re going to get there. As I wrote at the time, I was very happy when Wiegley was chosen as the new maintainer. After watching this video, I’m even happier and more confident than ever that he’s going to do a great job.