Very sorry to hear of his passing. Sven Guckes was one of the kind souls on Usenet in the 90s who went out of his way to happily help people with their tech setups. I especially learned quite a lot about Vim and Zsh from him and his rc files which he made available to everyone on his webpage, long before public dotfile repositories on Github were a thing, even before most people in the Unix world knew those tools existed.

Decades later I am still professionally and personally using and benefiting from the tools and lessons he encouraged and helped everyone out with back in the day.

My only regret was that I never got a chance to meet him and thank him in person. The closest I came was at Usenix LISA '11 in Boston when I was speaking at a config management BoF: after the session I was engaged in discussion with a German chap who I later found out was from FU Berlin. It turns out he knew Sven quite well, so I gave him $20 and asked him to give it to Sven to buy some beer on me. A small gesture for the considerable help and advice he had given to people like me.

Rest in peace my friend. You made the world a better place with your kind words and deeds.

Well known by many in the German chaos-sphere. Sven was always out for helping others. Was behind vim.org and you will find more on Sven on http://www.guckes.net/sven/

sven spent the last weeks in a care facility surrounded by his friends who would not stop coming to visit and entertain him with retelling the fun times they had together in the past.

sven kept repeating that he wished that his friends would connect and talk with each other.

there is a project to create a book with stories and experiences about him.

if you have any stories to share, how sven has helped you or something else memorable please post it (or send it to me) and i will forward it.

"Stay in touch! Talk with each other!"

I've met few people with a similar decades of dedication to helping and supporting users, particularly newbies, to work with FOSS. You must have an incredible patience to do that. I never shared that quality, so maybe that made me notice his gift/dedication even more.

After Joerg 'schily' Schilling passing last year, with Sven Guckes another of the "Berlin FOSS old guard" has passed in a rather short amount of time. Both way too young.

RIP, Sven.

Heavily leaned on his gnu-screen config tips & howto's, 15+ years ago. His work probably helped many (judging by how comprehensive his site was). Sorry to hear this. RIP.

FWIW, the next tweet: "Es war kein Covid-Tod" is saying that it WAS NOT a Covid death. In case you see the keyword but don't understand German.

I met Sven Guckes in 2005 at FOSDEM while doing the Lightning Talks, he gave one on mutt-ng.

I stayed on his couch for CCC back in 2005 and 2006.

Bye bye Sven:

https://twitter.com/zoobab/status/1495677697216892928

The first time I got an e-mail from Sven was, when he was scolding me because of an e-mail I sent to the mutt-user mailing list. Sven complained about my horrible English and told me that I have to take more time to edit e-mails before sending them to a public mailing list out of respect to all the readers. Afterwards he helped me with so many things -- as he helped many others. I wrote down some personal memories here: https://k7r.eu/command-line-tool-lover-and-free-software-ent...

Still proud he teached me how to do show "Vim" "eastside/westside style" with my fingers. RIP Sven.