On Sunday 20 February, Sven Guckes died. Sven was a long term member of the Free Software community and an great advocate for command line tools.
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, from time to time we had friendly e-mail exchanges on different topics. He helped me to optimise my mutt and my vim setup. When I was visiting Berlin, he gave myself and some others from the FSFE a short Berlin tour.
When I moved to Berlin in 2005 to do more volunteer work for the FSFE, he helped with a lot with information about Berlin. I will never forget the long city tour through Berlin on the bicycle he did for me; including bringing me to a sculpture of a gnu like animal to take a picture of me wearing an FSFE floating GNU shirt. I have several e-mails in which he offered me some things like furniture, a cooking pan, etc. others do not need anymore, but which might be of interest to me, my flatmates, or friends.
It was great meeting him at all the Free Software events including Linuxtage in Karlsruhe and Berlin, Berlinux, BLIT, FrOSCon, Chemnitzer Linuxtage, the Rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre (RMLL), and many others. Sven organised ride-shares for me and others in the community, helped people to find a place to sleep in Berlin and elsewhere, and he connected people, so they can help each other -- I still have many e-mails with invitations for his brunch meetings in my inbox.
I am still benefiting from what I have learnt from him about command line tools every day, including when writing this text, and I will miss talking to Sven with his red scarf at Free Software events in future. I am sure Sven would have been proud to known that Bram Moolenaar will dedicate the Vim 9.0 release to him.