Well, Emacs has been around for 40 years, and while it's difficult to gauge its popularity, there are many signs that suggest it has only been increasing. So I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Besides, I think there are also benefits from a tool having a steep learning curve. It indirectly acts as a filter, ensuring only people passionate about it stick around. It's not elitism, but it avoids scenarios like the Eternal September where the community gets flooded with new users and eventually never recovers. Software and services that become popular often stray from their original vision, and, with open source projects in particular, maintainers can be overwhelmed by support and feature requests from new users. Emacs doesn't have these problems, and hopefully never will.

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eviks 4 days ago | parent [-]

Older things have died, and measuring isn't that difficult, surveys exist, and it's been ~consistently in the low single digit %.

> only people passionate about it stick around. It's not elitism

Yeah, that's exactly the faux elitist fantasy, except needlessly hardships also kills passion, and elite engineering ignites it, but being slow, unergonomic, and hard to change is the opposite of that. So you can't even get net win on 'passion', let alone some more directly relevant skills that help progressing development

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iLemming 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

All of these points are wrong, or at least debatable. Emacs is not slow, or unergonomic, and certainly not hard to change.

What elitism are you talking about? Is math or string theory elitist? If I find them frustrating (because of learning curve) or intimidating (because of unfamiliar concepts) or if I'm annoyed at enthusiastic evangelism (darn you Gauss), is it me at fault or those "elitist" mathematicians? And Emacs is not even comparable to math - it is far easier to get into and to master.

When people gripe about vim or emacs using broad generalizations, lacking details, you can almost sense their own insecurities and feel compelled to apologize for that one time when someone condescendingly argued with them.

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imiric 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Older things have died

I suppose so, but very few user applications have had the same longevity. There have been numerous text editors and word processors from the same era and after it that have disappeared, yet Emacs has endured. That has to mean something.

> measuring isn't that difficult, surveys exist, and it's been ~consistently in the low single digit %.

Surveys are not a good way of measuring the health of a specific project. Not all users will respond, and the percentages are skewed by the number of participants and popularity of other options.

A better way, though still inaccurate, would be to look at the amount of activity in the project's repository, the number of contributors, and the number of packages written in Elisp over time.

Emacs' official repo doesn't keep track of such statistics, but the GitHub mirror[1] shows signs of a very healthy project. You could also check package stats[2] or the amount of Elisp projects on GH[3], and compare them to Wayback Machine snapshots from a few years ago, and notice that they keep increasing.

These are all signs that Emacs is not going anywhere. The slow but steady growth is the positive aspect I was referring to earlier. Explosive growth is not good for an OSS project.

> Yeah, that's exactly the faux elitist fantasy ...

I mean, you're entitled to your opinion, but I haven't noticed any elitism in the Emacs community. It's mostly a bunch of hackers and tinkerers who are passionate about software and improving their workflow, as you can see from this article and comments here. There's no gatekeeping since anyone is free to use Emacs how they want to use it. Help and documentation is widely available, including within Emacs itself.

So I think you have the wrong idea and an axe to grind for some reason, which I can't really help you with. Cheers!

[1]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/pulse

[2]: https://emacsmirror.net/stats/compare.html#Summary

[3]: https://github.com/topics/elisp

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eviks 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Surveys are not a good way of measuring the health of a specific project.

Why did you change the subject from popularity to project health?

> or the amount of Elisp projects on GH[3], and compare them to Wayback Machine snapshots from a few years ago, and notice that they keep increasing.

So? They can't really decrease as an abandoned project would just continue to exist. (If GH disappears then you'd have a big drop as a lot wouldn't get transferred). And a few users creating new packages can also sustain the growth for as long as you have a few users.

> The slow but steady growth

Which you don't have, users are the key metric here, and that's low and not growing

> Explosive growth is not good for an OSS project.

Not good, but excellent, but that's not the only alternative. Increasing share to 40% over 40 years wouldn't have been explosive

> I haven't noticed any elitism in the Emacs community.

You're entitled to your rosy observations of the "community", but the topic was more narrow - the ineffectiveness of overcomplicated filters in igniting passion.

> There's no gatekeeping since anyone is free to use Emacs how they want to use it.

There always is, for example, there are big iron gates blocking changes in the default health hazardous emacs-pinky keybinds. Of course, of course, if you waste enough time you'll be able to passionately hack a better system yourself, more power to you!

> So I think you have the wrong idea and an axe to grind for some reason, which I can't really help you with.

Indeed, much easier to conjure a fantasy axe

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jact 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’m not the same guy you were arguing with, but it’s much stranger to have such a weird and focused hatred for a text editor than it is to be a fan of a text editor.

	▲	iLemming 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Emacs is not really a text editor. It's rather a Lisp REPL with a built-in text editor. Everything what makes Emacs so great is because of that. That specifically makes it difficult to compare with other editors or IDEs. But sure, some people complain just for the sake of whining - for them, snow is not white enough, salt doesn't taste salty, sugar ain't sweet and Emacs sucks. Yeah, whatever you say, darling.