New contributors to GNU Emacs over time : emacsAs of 2025, GNU Emacs has had 1,608 individual committers throughout its..." />As of 2025, GNU Emacs has had 1,608 individual committers throughout its...">jump to contentmy subreddits<br>edit subscriptions<br>popular<br>-all<br>-users<br>| AskReddit<br>-pics<br>-funny<br>-movies<br>-gaming<br>-worldnews<br>-news<br>-todayilearned<br>-nottheonion<br>-explainlikeimfive<br>-mildlyinteresting<br>-DIY<br>-videos<br>-OldSchoolCool<br>-TwoXChromosomes<br>-tifu<br>-Music<br>-books<br>-LifeProTips<br>-dataisbeautiful<br>-aww<br>-science<br>-space<br>-Showerthoughts<br>-askscience<br>-Jokes<br>-Art<br>-IAmA<br>-Futurology<br>-sports<br>-UpliftingNews<br>-food<br>-nosleep<br>-creepy<br>-history<br>-gifs<br>-InternetIsBeautiful<br>-GetMotivated<br>-gadgets<br>-announcements<br>-WritingPrompts<br>-philosophy<br>-Documentaries<br>-EarthPorn<br>-photoshopbattles<br>-listentothis<br>-blog

more "

emacscomments

Want to join? Log in or sign up in seconds.

limit my search to r/emacsuse the following search parameters to narrow your results:<br>subreddit:subredditfind submissions in "subreddit"author:usernamefind submissions by "username"site:example.comfind submissions from "example.com"url:textsearch for "text" in urlselftext:textsearch for "text" in self post contentsself:yes (or self:no)include (or exclude) self postsnsfw:yes (or nsfw:no)include (or exclude) results marked as NSFWe.g. subreddit:aww site:imgur.com dog<br>see the search faq for details.

advanced search: by author, subreddit...

this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026<br>129 points (99% upvoted)<br>shortlink:

Submit a new link

Submit a new text post

emacs<br>joinleaveA sub-reddit for the timeless and infinitely powerful editor and Lisp environment, Emacs.

Rules

The topic is Emacs. Submissions should be on it. Comment threads may diverge, within reason.

Be kind, please.

If it's supposed to be funny, it should be.

Get Emacs

Windows

Mac OS X

GNU/Linux and BSD (Just get it from your distribution's package manager)

Build it from source

Emacs Resources

Emacs Wiki

WikEmacs

Emacs Reference (PDF)

Learning & Mastering Emacs

Weekly tips/tricks/etc threads

Emacs Tutorials

Want to see what Emacs is capable of?!

Beginner’s Guide to Emacs

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs

How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners

Related Subreddits

r/orgmode

r/evilmode

r/spacemacs

r/planetemacs

r/doomemacs

Useful Emacs configuration files and distributions

Better Defaults

Example configurations

Quick pain-saver tip

Put the Caps Lock key to better use!

a community for 18 years

MODERATORS

message the mods

11 &middot; 17 comments<br>Fortnightly Tips, Tricks, and Questions — 2026-06-30 / week 26<br>127 &middot; 21 comments<br>New contributors to GNU Emacs over time<br>37 &middot; 37 comments<br>How to use terminals inside emacs?<br>11 &middot; 2 comments<br>Abbreviations, but locally<br>9 &middot; 4 comments<br>elixir-ts-mode: Highlighting and navigation for do/end, fn/end etc. keywords?<br>64 &middot; 19 comments<br>Memorize vocabulary on the go on Emacs Android<br>13 &middot; 19 comments<br>Help me make sense of org mode<br>7 &middot; 4 comments<br>Extended evil-mode tutorial?<br>28 &middot; 22 comments<br>There is VimGolf, but is there any EmacsGolf?<br>4 &middot; 8 comments<br>Need help figuring out newline behaviour in doom emacs

Welcome to Reddit,<br>the front page of the internet.<br>Become a Redditorand join one of thousands of communities.

&times;

128<br>129<br>130

New contributors to GNU Emacs over time (i.redd.it)

submitted 5 hours ago by a_alberti<br>21 comments<br>share<br>save<br>hide<br>report

I was reading the Wikipedia page for Emacs and found this statement:

As of 2025, GNU Emacs has had 1,608 individual committers throughout its history.

This made me curious about how first-time contributors to Emacs are distributed over time. I took a local checkout of the Emacs mirror repository and scanned the commit history. For each commit, I recorded the Git author name and email, treated the pair (author_name, author_email) as an identity, and then kept only the first commit where each identity appears. Finally, I plotted the cumulative number of distinct authors over time. I used Git's .mailmap normalization (git log --use-mailmap) to map known name/email variants to the same person when the repository provides such mappings.

This is just a quick/fun experiment, not a rigorous study. There are obvious caveats. The most obvious ones are possible duplicated identities not covered by .mailmap.

Still, the cumulative plot surprised me. It seems to show two very different slopes, with a clear change around 2010: before then, relatively few new author identities appear per year; after then, the number rises much faster.

What is good news for me: Emacs did not decline in popularity. It can still attract new contributors, presumably younger fellow Emacs enthusiasts.

Does anyone know what explains the change around 2010? Was it related to migration away from older version-control workflows, when migrating from CVS to Bazaar and then Git, or simply to a change in how patches were attributed to their original authors?

all 21...