Is Emacs dying? Lordy, I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used it seriously declaring it a spent force. To be fair, redditisinmyheart doesn’t appear to fall into that category and seems to be asking an honest question rather than making an ill informed statement but most people declaring Emacs dead don’t know what they’re talking about.
Part of the confusion for some people is the conflation of two separate issues:
- Has development and improvement of Emacs stopped or slowed?
- Is the user base as large as it once was. Is it growing or shrinking?
The answer to the first question is an unequivocal “No”. Org Mode, Magit, Native Compilation, Treesitter, LSP, and tons of lesser improvements are happening all the time. Lately, the Emacs developers are making major releases about once a year and smaller releases regularly. Meanwhile, all those “vibrant editors” are still trying to clone Org and Magit
I don’t have figures at hand but it’s my impression that Emacs development and the introduction of major new features has accelerated lately. Regardless, it’s clearly not the case that development has slowed or stalled.
The answer to the second question is more difficult and part of what makes this a Red Meat Friday post. Again, I don’t have figures but it’s my impression that Emacs usage as a percentage of the possible user base has shrunk. Partly, that’s because there are many more choices now, but also because the nature of the user base has changed.
It used to be—before computers were cool—that being a programmer was a calling and those who answered the call were willing and even eager to expend major effort in honing their craft. That included spending the time to master “difficult” editors like Emacs and Vi. There are still plenty of people like that, of course, but there are also a lot of people to whom it’s only a job to be gotten through with the least effort possible. Of course users in the latter group aren’t going to spend the effort to master Emacs when they can simply use VS Code instead. No steep learning curves; Just buttons to push and a lot of bling to make it look really cool.
Years before Red Meat Friday became an occasional offering here, I wrote a post that could have qualified. It posited that serious programmers use Emacs, Vim, or (on the Mac) TextMate. It got a bit of pushback but I think its point remains valid and probably speaks to why the percentage of Emacs users has shrunk.
In any event, I’m not the least worried about the imminent demise of Emacs.