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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

I understand why there's all this concern about making Emacs popular--as software professionals, we've all seen a few tools that we use and love wither at the vine and die slow deaths. But the concern for _overall_ popularity is a little misplaced. There's more developers than ever, and the pie continues to grow; Emacs just needs a sufficient total userbase to stay maintained, and that seems already to be in place.

The greatest threat to Emacs, as to any other fairly well-liked open-source editor, is a paradigm change in how software gets built or run, not whether it has 7% or 9% mindshare.

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I agree with this. I used emacs in the late 90s through early 00s, and it worked great. I pretty much stick with BBEdit these days, because it works great for my personal workflow. I never got into vim: I only learned enough of it to edit config files and the like when I shell into a computer.

The modern paradigm of running npm/brew/composer/webpack/whatever gimcrack tool that gets shoehorned into the build process has led a lot of people to the VSCode-ish side of things that make integrating these things easy. emacs tends to look like a well-appointed workshop with lots of good, sharp tools and a stack of raw lumber, whereas VSCode looks like a finished Chesterfield. It takes a certain sort of person to prefer the workshop over the finished piece, and I'm not sure you could ever change that.

I was nodding along with the first paragraph. But then,

> The greatest threat to Emacs, [..] is a paradigm change in how software gets built or run

Is a little to far into scify land.

First it requires software to no longer be text based, and then it requires virtually all software to switch to this non-text based solution.

In that world a single user can keep Emacs up to date and compatible by asking our AI overlords to do it.

I see where you're going - but I've personally noticed that there are a lot of things coming along with these cloud infrastructure paradigms that have made me feel like my localhost text editing workflows are going to make me look and feel even more like an absolute dinosaur as time goes on. I can't speak eloquently on this as I'm still an amateur to these cloud infra configuration concepts and their real limitations on how I'm used to thinking about application development, but I hope this comment sparks some inspiration for someone else to do so.

Don't think of it as you being a dinosaur - think of it as you being a sane person making sane decisions about your development environment.

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