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