[blahgeek]

As someone who have only used Emacs and Vim in the past 10 years, I wish you are right. But according to my observation, 90% of those 38% of developers only use Vim in when they are sshing to the server to update few config files or make simple edits to the scripts. When they do proper programming (like hundreds lines of coding in a project), they switch to other IDEs like VSCode. So yes I personally still consider Vim and Emacs “niche” editors.

[throwaway4496]

Yeah, even if that is true, what part of a tool used by close to 40% of developers is niche?

niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

[davrosthedalek]

It's niche /for development work/. Being used by a developer doesn't make it used for development. Or the most used developing tool would be the toilet.

[epcoa]

While not going to argue that vim is niche, I don’t think it is. StackExchange surveys are likely highly unrepresentative and lack external validity. I do not believe 40% of developers use vim based on such an unvalidated and likely biased study.

[worthless-trash]

In rhr group if hundred plus programmers I work with, id estimate less than 5 percent use anything but emacs and vim.

The other tooling feels niche to me.

[nojs]

Worth noting that a lot of people use those IDEs with vim keys