Emacs Survey 2020 Results | Hacker News Reader

Emacs Survey 2020 Results

emacssurvey.org

6 pointspama6 comments

I'm suprised most that Emacs users on Windows is a minority. Linux and macOS takes the helm for the most Emacs users here. Second most surprising stuff was that the number of people using the Spacemacs configuration was much lower than I expected to it to be as imo it's the most polished Emacs experience out there. Also, the results from the question of what was your editor prior to using Emacs caught me off guard as I personally switched from VSCode to Emacs so I thought the majority would be so as well, but it turns out most people actually switched from Vim! That makes me think that the Emacs demographics seems to consist mostly of old-timers who have been programming quite before the appearance of modern hand-holding editors like VSCode or Sublime Text.

On a side note, the Emacs community really needs a proper Discourse forum and a Matrix chat channel. Tbh, the r/emacs subreddit is the only Emacs 'forum' I know of. I don't hate Reddit but I'd rather discuss about Emacs somewhere else.

I think there’s probably a lot of selection bias in who filled out the survey.

At my workplace, emacs is the standard text editor and windows users use emacs over putty as we have a bunch of internal modes and tooling that only run on Linux. It’s a bit of a shame because terminal use means missing out on lots of features (e.g. decent mousing, less space for vertical dividers, menus, fonts, image display (this used to be important for the menus in M-x lunch but that doesn’t matter so much these days).

There is a very interesting distribution of programming languages for the emacs users that answered: Python first, bash/sh second, then web related, systems, and popular or rising languages, down to R, lisp, assembly, Common Lisp (I assume) and c#. It shows the breadth, power, and extensibility of such a nicely designed tool, when most languages in the list were invented after the Emacs editor.

I imagined C and C++ to be the language Emacs is most used for but I was wrong by a long shot. No idea Python was THAT popular for Emacs users. I primarily use C# with Emacs and if I just use it as a text editor then it's fine, but doing an entire C# project in Emacs imo is straight up impossible. I still have to use Visual Studio for project management, adding NuGet packages, unit tests, builds, SVN for work (I just use Magit for my own stuff), and whatever Microsoft-made BS that comes up (had a JSON parsing error yesterday, tried to fix it for 20 minutes without success, blindly ran the project again and now it's magically fixed). I can see why C# is at the bottom of the Emacs usage list.

I'm surprised that the most used theme is the default theme

And the default theme is a light theme too! What were those users thinking!?

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