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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Professional developers mostly use Macs these days, and won't touch anything that doesn't have a nice UI that does exactly what they expect. Anything that looks too textual or "computer-code-y" that's not related to what they're working on, they will stay away from.

Case in point: virtually no one uses Emacs. Even Vim is diminishing; most devs now use Visual Studio Code.

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> Professional developers mostly use Macs these days

> most devs now use Visual Studio Code.

You seem to live in some other world than I ...

Wouldn't the stack overflow developers survey be more valid than relying on your professional peers?

Around 30% use vim or Emacs. Linux is about as popular as Mac and windows is still as popular as both combined.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

The numbers don't add up to 100% so it must be non-exclusive (ie, people use VS.Code and Vim).

Worth noting that simply adding means that yes, Vim+Emacs ~= 30%, but VS.Code + VS ~= 80%

I'm guessing that overlap between different options might be hard to predict in some situations but easier in others. If raw data is available you could of course answer more precisely.

I'm thinking that plenty of users use both an ide and a text editor but few use more than one text editor. For example few use emacs because its required by their job thus emacs + vim probably IS 30% but VS.Code + VS probably has a substantial overlap.

No they don't. The stack overflow survey shows that the highest number of developers use Windows at 47.5% followed by Mac at 26.8% and Linux at 25.6% https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

I vehemently implore you to spend some time outside the Valley bubble.

This is Hackernews. What's outside the Valley bubble besides desert and the occasional poor soul who undergoes the indignity of growing old rather than Renewing through Carousel? :)

I work on the East Coast at a company that's over 100 years old -- though they are modernizing their development efforts (something I'm heavily involved with). And literally everyone else in our portfolio uses VSCode to develop with except for legacy Java stuff which is usually manipulated with Eclipse.

A Triplebyte study from two years ago showed that most developers undergoing their interview process used Visual Studio Code: https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual...

While Triplebyte is Silly Valley, presumably they have clients outside the bubble.

There's a pretty good vim mode for vscode.

Any half-decent VIM user knows that there are no good vim emulators, only ones which do the absolute basics right. That includes vim mode for vscode which last time I used it even lagged when using it.

The only vim mode that didn't make me rage quit was evil mode in emacs. I use mostly vanilla vim, and there's always something that isn't implemented or isn't implemented properly.

Well, yeah, not sure why you even wrote this except to get some snark in. The point is the trade off of having the basic if imperfect operation of vi/vim, along with what vscode offers. That includes connecting with the large community of vscode users.

Aren't Emacs, vim, visual studio code all in the same class of smart text editors with plug-ins that provide ide features?

I don't think different default functionality fundamentally changes its class.

Not really. VSCode has LSP and DAP support of of the box, for example.

They do?

I may or may not be using a Mac at some point during the day (because Apple forces me to, to do iOS development), but usually whether my host is Windows or Mac, I have 3~8 Linux VMs running at any particular time.

Now, I will use SublimeText, instead of vi, from time-to-time (not often), but I don't think I am out of the mainstream...

BTW: I up-voted you because I think you have a point worth discussing, and that's hard to do when you are down-voted to hell, even if I don't agree with you...

Step outside your bubble sometime; we don’t byte.

I like this pun:D

Virtually no one uses Emacs because 1) Lisps are out of favor (excepting Clojure, which has excellent support with Calva), 2) the out of the box experience is bad and customization is not simple at all, and imo 3) chording as the primary means of operation is outdated.

Evil mode is easy to set up and org-mode is almost enough to get someone to move to emacs. I don't know tht numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if emacs was roughly as popular as vim.

How is living on Planet Mars? Go out of the valley once and you'll learn about a whole new world!

t. using vim, tmux, i3 and linux.

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