These are the photos my wife took at his home. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu...

Like the 5th picture down you can see him standing (he uses a standing desk!) and if you blow up the screen, you can see part of an emacs window on the left hand side. I believe he also was using emacs shell windows as well, but not 100% sure.

Direct Link: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/04/DK_VC_...

I can't emphasize enough how incredibly nice and welcoming he is. He is bursting with enthusiasm for computers, and my wife and his wife had to almost restrain him so he would sit for his pictures, because he would start talking to me again about computer related stuff.

Hard to tell at this resolution, but it looks like he's using a fairly bare X setup with a tiling window manager and only one Emacs frame on the left. The colours and layout on Emacs look like org-mode. Does he write with org-mode? I would have expected him to write bare TeX, of course. Maybe he's doing something else with org-mode.

He's got Xeyes on the right, and the shell windows could conceivably be Emacs too, but if so, he's customised them to remove the minibuffer.

his fvwm config is public, and there's a screenshot floating around, if you want to take a closer look https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg

the only mistake you won't be able to correct from observing screenshot is the "look like org-mode" thing. it's https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/color-mo... minor mode which lets you highlight arbitrary lines in a buffer.

“The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story,” Knuth said.

Great quote and great insight. Understanding how the brain works and is stimulated augments communication. Especially important for dry, theoretical subjects.

Look how he use only a single screen and has this extraordinary device nobody uses anymore left of his screen but proves to be one of the best tool to dig deep into code.

Whose photos are on the wall? Would be interesting to recognize some of them.

The pictures are beautiful, thank you for sharing that.

Emacs windows. There are no panes in Emacs.

The Emacs window is held in a frame. The operating system calls that frame a window, but that's not what Emacs calls it.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindowsAndFrames

As to why Emacs calls everything something else, well, Emacs was first. As to why Emacs doesn't change its names, well, have you ever tried to change Stallman's mind?

I know. I’ve been an emacs user for 30 years, but I tend to just call them buffers. In the old days when I would be using a PPP or SLIP connection into a dialup Unix, my whole screen would be Emacs in VT100 mode so it made a lot more sense to thing of them as windows back then.

learning that Knuth uses Emacs has been my proudest moment as an Emacs user.

We won! Emacs vs VI war over. It's finally over thanks to Knuth! VI users will be forced to pay reparations, and agree to cede territory back to the Emacs military alliance. :)

apparently only uses one screen too. can we (re)start some religious wars over that now? :)

I’d bet it’s also a very vanilla Emacs with little to no plug-ins bar a few custom functions and key mappings that he wrote like 30 years ago.

It is on-going. See some remarks before on whether he would be faster if he use vi.

(Sorry have to run …)