Comment by eviks
21 hours ago
> brutally steep learning curve.... It may take you years to appreciate it, and a lifetime to understand it. But that's OK.
It isn't, that's how apps decline in popularity and eventually die, thus decreasing the value of the huge amount of time you've invested
Emacs lost popularity because from ~ 2010-2020 the project was a bit dead. There was a lot of issues going on with emacs forks and in general the maintainers weren't merging functionality that became standard in other editors like multiple modes in a buffer, LSP support, or tree-sitter grammars. The community filled in to write packages to bridge this gap but it became a bit silly to download 20 plugins just to get a basic modern editing experience. So community interest left to other projects like VSCode or neovim.
The project sort of "woke up" in 2020 and has been landing new functionality at a crazy pace. Now I pretty much look at every NEWS file to see what changed salivating over the changes. At times the changes feel overwhelming as someone who only hacks on emacs when there's time, but the other great thing is emacs has such a high guarantee of stability (usually) that even if you aren't up-to-date on the latest and greatest your config can just keep chugging as it is.
I disagree with the other commenters about there being a steep learning curve. If anything it's amazing to me how people can go through the vim tutorial and learn about motions and selection commands just to type things into a window. Emacs has no such requirements and if you enable cua-mode you basically get any editor out there. Emacs's learning curve mostly comes form the fact that people who like to hack elisp and customize Emacs start constantly growing their configs.
It is true, but it's also not the case. The steep learning curve is flattened quite a bit by available "starter pack" configs and the amount of fresh articles. So you can get a functional editor and then gradually bend it to your needs. Also, LLMs turned out to be quite good at generating working elisp and helping out in general.
Well, Emacs has been around for 40 years, and while it's difficult to gauge its popularity, there are many signs that suggest it has only been increasing. So I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
Besides, I think there are also benefits from a tool having a steep learning curve. It indirectly acts as a filter, ensuring only people passionate about it stick around. It's not elitism, but it avoids scenarios like the Eternal September where the community gets flooded with new users and eventually never recovers. Software and services that become popular often stray from their original vision, and, with open source projects in particular, maintainers can be overwhelmed by support and feature requests from new users. Emacs doesn't have these problems, and hopefully never will.
Older things have died, and measuring isn't that difficult, surveys exist, and it's been ~consistently in the low single digit %.
> only people passionate about it stick around. It's not elitism
Yeah, that's exactly the faux elitist fantasy, except needlessly hardships also kills passion, and elite engineering ignites it, but being slow, unergonomic, and hard to change is the opposite of that. So you can't even get net win on 'passion', let alone some more directly relevant skills that help progressing development
> Older things have died
I suppose so, but very few user applications have had the same longevity. There have been numerous text editors and word processors from the same era and after it that have disappeared, yet Emacs has endured. That has to mean something.
> measuring isn't that difficult, surveys exist, and it's been ~consistently in the low single digit %.
Surveys are not a good way of measuring the health of a specific project. Not all users will respond, and the percentages are skewed by the number of participants and popularity of other options.
A better way, though still inaccurate, would be to look at the amount of activity in the project's repository, the number of contributors, and the number of packages written in Elisp over time.
Emacs' official repo doesn't keep track of such statistics, but the GitHub mirror[1] shows signs of a very healthy project. You could also check package stats[2] or the amount of Elisp projects on GH[3], and compare them to Wayback Machine snapshots from a few years ago, and notice that they keep increasing.
These are all signs that Emacs is not going anywhere. The slow but steady growth is the positive aspect I was referring to earlier. Explosive growth is not good for an OSS project.
> Yeah, that's exactly the faux elitist fantasy ...
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion, but I haven't noticed any elitism in the Emacs community. It's mostly a bunch of hackers and tinkerers who are passionate about software and improving their workflow, as you can see from this article and comments here. There's no gatekeeping since anyone is free to use Emacs how they want to use it. Help and documentation is widely available, including within Emacs itself.
So I think you have the wrong idea and an axe to grind for some reason, which I can't really help you with. Cheers!
[1]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/pulse
[2]: https://emacsmirror.net/stats/compare.html#Summary
[3]: https://github.com/topics/elisp