Last Friday, I offered up a Red Meat Friday post that discussed the silly but depressingly widely held idea that Emacs is dying. As I said in that post, this is not an idea that’s held by anyone who actually uses Emacs but appears to be an article of faith held by those unwilling to spend the effort to learn Emacs at even a journeyman level.
Bozhidar Batsov also discussed this issue recently and dismissed it as the usual nonsense that should be ignored. He even says he didn’t bother reading the reddit post that occasioned Batsov’s and my subsequent posts. He does, however, provide a bit of evidence for one of my suppositions.
I speculated that Emacs usage as a percentage of the total possible user base has declined. Take a look at the chart he provides for the evidence. The TL;DR is that while VS Code holds 73.71% of that user base, Emacs is down at 4.69%. Notice that that figure says nothing about the total number of Emacs users. It may have increased, as Batsov suggests, or it may have declined. There’s probably no way of knowing.
One thing for sure, the Emacs editor is going strong, enjoying healthy development, and is probably growing, at least in total user terms. I’d be willing to bet that Emacs will still be going strong long after VS Code has faded into same obscurity being enjoyed by all the other would-be Emacs killers.
As of this writing, no one has bothered commenting on Irreal. That’s probably because Irreal readers are smarter than the average bear and consider everything I said obvious and not in need of further discussion. It was picked up by the Emacs subreddit, however, and there are plenty of comments there if you really want to know what others are saying.