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Comment by lgessler | Hacker News Reader

I'd venture that it's not among rank-and-file software developers, though.

I’m a software developer, that commonly talks about software development with a diverse group of software developers.

I’ve never had a conversation with a software developer where they didn’t know what vim or emacs are.

I just suspect that people here on HN are coming from the upper portions of the software developer spectrum in terms of experience, aptitude, enthusiasm, and training--there are plenty of other people in the world who do software development but lack some of those things. For my own part, I graduated with a bachelors in computer science having only heard Emacs mentioned once in a course (at the beginning of the second course in the intro sequence) by a particularly enthusiastic professor, and I never heard anyone talking about Vim or Emacs at my first job, where everyone more or less had to work exclusively with Visual Studio and an in-house IDE.

Anyone that knows what vi is almost certainly knows what emacs is.

I'd say there is a fair few beginner Linux users who have followed a tutorial on OMGUbuntu or stackexchange who know of VI but will never hear of emacs.

> I'd say there is a fair few beginner Linux users who have followed a tutorial on OMGUbuntu or stackexchange who know of VI but will never hear of emacs.

Ok.

But of those people who stick with vi for more than 6 months, how many of them have yet to hear of emacs at that point? Maybe 5%?

The software developers I asspciate with today in the enterprise world fall in one of two camps:

1) Emacs? What is that? Looks like it came out before I was born. No thank you, I need something modern.

2) Emacs? That's still around?! I remember that from my Vax days...

Either way, few of them would countenance the idea of using Emacs to do professional software development in 2020. The vast, vast majority of developers out there use either a large feature-rich IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or Eclipse... or they use Visual Studio Code.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

4.5%. So not many but it's certainly "among."

That's those who use Emacs, not those who know what it is.

Surely the number of people who know what it is is higher than those who use it?

My post was mostly a response to "not many".

Really? I don't think I've ever met a software developer that didn't know what vim and emacs were.

my entire MAAS development team at Canonical are emacs users. we also have those who use vi or even visual studio. it's all about what works for you, i guess.

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