[omnicognate]

Not sure where you get "most" from. Personally I've found the exact opposite: Despite having been forced by work constraints to use most major IDE platforms at one point or another, sometimes for years at a time, I always come back to emacs with great relief and find it better in pretty much every way. I know better than to assume my experience is that of "most" people, though.

[roman_soldier]

The data shows VS Code is used by double digit % of developers, whereas Emacs is less than 1%, I think that qualifies for most.

[iLemming]

That's not the point - McDonald's has 40000 joints - the most popular restaurant in the world. Still doesn't make it the best food option.

Yes, Emacs is not popular, but if you look deeper, you may find unsurprisingly that most Emacs coders are strong developers. That correlation isn't coincidental - you don't stick with Emacs unless you're willing to learn; it effectively teaches you about Lisp, extensibility, and programming in general.

Yet, they are not talking about general popularity of editors among devs, but about people who ever tried Emacs - the argument is that the majority of them try, fail and abandon it. For which obviously there's no polemical (or otherwise) data points.

[self_awareness]

I've installed emacs now on ArchLinux Wayland system and its window refuses to resize (on purely default settings), and freezes the contents until I move it. Very refreshing indeed.

I bet this is some kind of a known issue, but that just reinforces my original point above.

edit: yeah, here it is: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871

I mean, how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?

[iLemming]

> I've installed emacs now on

I never had what you describe. The variability there could be almost random - which version of Emacs you're installing? How are you installing it? Are you trying to build it from source? What renderer are you using - there are several: Lucid, Motif, GTK, NS, W32, Haiku, Android, Cairo, Pgtk. Perhaps it's installing different renderer instead of using pgtk. Maybe it's not a bug with Emacs but with the package that bundles it for your distro?

> how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?

It does seem to be an Emacs issue. But it is a specific issue that happens on the combination of your hardware and your OS configuration.

[self_awareness]

Yes, I'm always having "special" problems. It's probably due to the fact that I jump around platforms a lot between Linux, macOS and Windows, mixed GUI and ssh.

For example, macOS emacs always starting at the bottom of the window stack instead of the top. macOS emacs having different font notation than Linux emacs, so maintaining common config is hard. Terminal emacs -nw having its own set of rules, and M-x needs to be addressed with ESC x. Etc, etc.

[iLemming]

Yeah, I admit, fair complaints. Emacs can be tricky to render things exactly how you like - I use it on Mac, Linux, GUI and terminal and do have different semantics for each.

The tradeoff is that Emacs does let you handle it all - you're not forced to accept platform defaults like in some editors. Most editors have their UI/behavior largely baked in by the platform. You can customize colors and keybindings, but the fundamentals - window management, font rendering, how system keys work, terminal integration - are mostly dictated by whether you're on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

So when you have mac Emacs behaving differently than Linux Emacs, it's not because the software forced you into that corner - it's because the underlying systems are different and Emacs exposes that difference rather than hiding it behind a unified abstraction layer.

Emacs gives you the rope to make things consistent across platforms, but also the rope to hang yourself. Other editors pre-tie the knot for you.