Renowned Developer Chris Wellons Officially Bids Farewell to Emacs

Chris Wellons, a software engineer with roughly 24 years of programming experience, has contributed to several open‑source projects such as the RSS/Atom reader Elfeed , the SSH honeypot Endlessh , and the encrypted backup tool Enchive . He also mentors high‑school and university students in software development.

Wellons, a dedicated Linux user who prefers Debian (and can also work with Ubuntu), currently uses a Latitude 7490 laptop and follows a minimalist hardware approach, caring only that memory and software configuration meet his needs.

He uses NeoMutt as his email client and develops all software with Vim, avoiding IDEs. Although Emacs was his "second favorite" editor, he now only employs it to extend its functionality.

Last Tuesday he announced his final keystroke in Emacs, ending a 20‑year daily habit. Over the past half‑year he has been gradually replacing Emacs with modal editing and Vim.

To replace the remaining Emacs‑based tools, he wrote two small programs in a few days: M‑x calc was superseded by stackcalc, and his long‑used RSS reader Elfeed was replaced by Elfeed2. Elfeed2 already exceeds the original in functionality.

Both stackcalc and Elfeed2 are written in C++ using the wxWidgets framework, providing native GUIs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Wellons chose wxWidgets over Dear ImGui because it better suits long‑running desktop applications and offers richer native UI components and cross‑platform tooling. The projects manage dependencies via CMake FetchContent and can be built with a single command in a w64devkit environment.

From a technical‑trend perspective, Wellons’s transition is illustrative: tasks that previously required three weeks now finish in a single day thanks to his new workflow, dramatically accelerating development. The rewrite of Elfeed into Elfeed2, for example, went from a low‑motivation project to a usable product in just two days.

Wellons praises wxWidgets despite some character‑encoding quirks and performance drawbacks, noting that its overall performance exceeded expectations and that he plans to base most future GUI projects on it, reserving Dear ImGui for scenarios demanding immediate rendering.

The community views his departure as a significant loss for Emacs, given his extensive contributions and deep familiarity with the platform.