[ThinkBeat]

It is great to be reminded of the large community Emcas still has.

I am probably in a tiny minority but I wish that Emacs had won the "most popular editor"¹ instead of M$ VsCode

¹ I did read that VsCode is the biggest now but I havent really looked into to it to verify that statement.

[slightwinder]

> I am probably in a tiny minority but I wish that Emacs had won the "most popular editor"¹ instead of M$ VsCode

Emacs is ~40 years old now, it's lost many popular-votes through its lifetime. VS Code is just the latest in a long list of popular editors. It also lost to the vi-family, to IDEs, to notepad++, to sublime and probably some others. Emacs is not meant to win, and that's ok, because that what makes it great, is also what makes it losing in popularity with the crowd.

[uludag]

I think there's a critical mass of usage/popularity that a software tool needs to sustain itself and I would think that after that point, the returns on popularity are increasingly diminishing. After reading the book "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal, I'm almost convinced that an excessive user base could be harmful to the core maintainers and thus to the project as a whole.

Some language communities can get by with a minuscule percentage of total users. 4% of all developers for example is a sizable amount. I think Emacs is in a pretty good sweet spot.

[captn3m0]

> Visual Studio Code is used by more than twice as many developers than its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio.

VSCode - 73%, Vim - 21%, Emacs - 4%.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...