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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how many users Emacs has lost to VS Code over the past few years. I'm one of them.

I think Emacs users care more about the total population than one particular outmigration.

I don't have actual data, but if I compare to the amount of activity (blog posts, tweets/toots, packages, etc), then (heavy) Emacs usage seems to be monotonically increasing.

Almost everyone I know who switched to VSCode was using Emacs primarily for work, and mostly limited to SW development. That category of users may be large in absolute numbers, but most of the Emacs ecosystem is not driven by that category (i.e. even if that category shrinks to a tenth of its size, it won't have any impact on Emacs development).

Just take a look at the talks in the conference. The vast majority are orthogonal to SW development/programming.

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Why would emacs users care what editor anyone else uses? Emacs seems like the sort of thing you use and develop for if it solves a problem for you. It's not a business; it doesn't need to win popularity contests.

I think it's interesting to think about why people choose things. You can then decide "we want these qualities as well", or "we don't want those", or "we want them but haven't figured out how to get there without paying too high of a cost we want in other things".

Not a goal in itself to capture everyone, of course. But it's a data point!

"Data point" is simply this - Emacs and Vim have seen way too many popular editors and IDEs over the years and VSCode is just another thing in a long list of "contenders" - Brief, Wordstar, Borland Sprint/Turbo Pascal/varios 'Builders', QEdit, TextPad, Norton, Delphi, Adobe shit, Macromedia stuff, Microsoft crap, Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.

Emacs proceeds strategically, not tactically. Even though it outlived so many different editors it was only a single decade, a point in history when it was considered kinda, sorta mainstream, the rest of its lifetime it wasn't.

Emacs is just like Lisp itself - it never dies, and never gets to be hugely popular. Anyone wishing either speedy death or widespread popularity for Lisp (and Emacs) will likely remain disappointed. Those who value Lisp and Emacs will continue using them, even decades from now. Those who never learn to appreciate either - will keep ignoring them.

I mean Lisp "never dies", but there have been plenty of Lisp flavors that have come and gone. We don't write Lisp, we write some flavor (each with vastly different properties and values).

There's nothing wrong with looking at the ecosystem and saying "huh, this is a pretty good idea". Emacs (the community as a whole) didn't ignore the LSP, and thanks to that it gets first-class support for tools that otherwise would have required someone to show up and "do the work" to get it to happen.

I do think we're in agreement about "strategically, not tactically". Like Emacs _is_ doing its own thing. It's just that sometimes you can see good ideas from other places.

The thing is Emacs, just like Lisp, can incorporate all those neat ideas without drastically transforming itself. I don’t know any strong features other editors have that users can’t replicate unless powered by closed source code. It won’t be as polished, but that mostly because users have different workflow.

Yup, Lisp is extremely malleable and egalitarian and unrestricted - that's why there's almost universally at least one dialect of Lisp exists for any non-lispy language and almost every known programming paradigm.

The only rule it insists on is the parentheses, and it's quite ridiculous how people dismiss the entirety of this foundation for incredibly powerful ideas and abstractions, solely for that reason.

Yeah I don’t think we’re in disagreement here. The community can do a lot with the flexibility granted to it!

Are you saying that most emacs users aren't in "SW development/programming"? Of course not.

Would someone not very carefully reading your comment think otherwise? Yes, probably.

I’m continually surprised how many non-programmers or occasional programmers use emacs. Writers seem to love it.

> Writers seem to love it.

Of course, how can you not love it? All the tools you need for writing are at your fingertips. You can have a thesaurus, spellchecking, translation and search, dictionaries, etymology lookup, word counter, Flesch-Kincaid reading ease tester, ChatGPT, Anthropic and other models, dictation, formatter, converter, exporter and so much more. Why would anyone ever exposed to that power willingly part with it?

Which packages do you recommend for each of these things? I don't have most of them in my Emacs.

You can simply 'M-x list-packages' and search for things.

- Thesaurus - there are a few different packages, powerthesaurus, le-thesaurus, etc. I use mw-thesaurus, at this point mainly out of habit, it's the first Emacs package I ever made and it served me so well, I never had reasons to look for alternatives.

- Spellchecking - I suppose flyspell still holds the majority, I prefer jinx.el, it completely replaced flyspell for me

- translation - also multiple choices, from translate-mode, org-translate, ob-translate, lingva, immersive-translate, etc. I use google-translate - for no particular good reason, it's just an old habit.

- search - consult-omni, it takes some initial tweaking, but then you can simultaneously search on Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, your browser history, etc., while typing the query once.

- dictionaries - sdcv

- etymology - define-it, wiktionary-bro

- word counter - is built-in; reading ease testing - writegood.el

- LLMs - multiple choices, gptel and chatgpt-shell are the most popular.

Thanks!

I suspect, that most of those users did not create such an elaborate setup, that has all those things. But perhaps, if there is a ready made config for all of it somewhere, maybe they are using that?

You don't really need an elaborate setup; it's sufficient to know how to install packages and explore some possibilities. It usually takes someone experienced to convince them that Emacs is truly the best choice for dealing with plain text. I'm not a musician, but I suppose if I was an aspiring and very talented guitar player and someone would convince me that Gibson Les Paul or Fender Statocaster is just the hands-down the best choice for the job - nothing would ever stop me from finding a way to have and use one, right?

And to leave you with a practical recommendation, not just philosophical rambling, here's https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio. Note that I haven't used it myself. I don't know anything about it, beyond its existence.

I guess I should clarify. I'm not surprised how much writers like it. I'm more surprised by how many non-programmers are enthusiastic about diving into elisp.

Right. I had the privilege and pleasure of watching and guiding people with and without a previous background in programming to learn a Lisp dialect. Some beginners, for various reasons, would pick Clojure or Emacs, or in one case, even both at the same time. Interestingly, they had no problem approaching new concepts. Meanwhile, programmers with previous experience in other programming languages sometimes struggled, became confused, and irritated. I think this makes sense - when you don't know any programming, you approach it without prejudice, there is nothing "weird" about things; you don't get confused about Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2, dynamic and lexical scope, naming, types, etc.; you have no reasons to dislike or hate things - when something works you get excited. And it's not too difficult to find some joy with Emacs these days - you only need to find a starter kit like Doom, open a scratch buffer write an expression and eval it. Once someone is guided through the initial steps, they'd write their first Lisp function or an expression, get to see it working - of course they get very enthusiastic.

I'm saying that the bulk of the community that keeps it alive and growing are either not SW professionals, or are but their use of Emacs goes well beyond SW use. As such, even if they "switch" to a tool like VSCode, they'll still primarily use Emacs for most things (email, document authoring, TODOs, etc). And Emacs as a SW will continue to grow as a result.

A significant portion of the Emacs "influencers" are not SW developers (think Protesilaos). Quite a few very popular Emacs packages are made by non-SW folks.

Which, as I pointed out, is why most of the talks are not related to SW development. Because that's not why the power users use Emacs.

In my (large) company, the bulk of Emacs users I've met use it for SW development, and little else. As such, while they may be really good users for the SW development they do, they tend to be fairly ignorant about the rest of Emacs (not heard of org mode or magit, some even think XEmacs is the improved Emacs, etc). Globally, such folks may well be in the majority, and if the bulk of them stop using Emacs, no one would even notice.

In fact, as someone who's been using Emacs since before VSCode existed, I simply did not notice the (real) exodus to VSCode. If you follow only the Emacs ecosystem (Emacs reddit, blogs, social media), the online engagement has exploded in the last 15 years. You would never guess that Emacs may have lost users overall (if it did).

I think your analysis applies to Neovim too.

Non-programmer usage of neovim outweighs programmer usage?

I consider myself a non-programmer and use nvim daily on my PC for config editing, note-taking, anime playlist management, writing emails (inside aerc). Next time I try programming, I'll also use it for that I'm sure.

vimwiki!

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