> I am probably in a tiny minority but I wish that Emacs had won the "most popular editor"¹ instead of M$ VsCode
Emacs is ~40 years old now, it's lost many popular-votes through its lifetime. VS Code is just the latest in a long list of popular editors. It also lost to the vi-family, to IDEs, to notepad++, to sublime and probably some others. Emacs is not meant to win, and that's ok, because that what makes it great, is also what makes it losing in popularity with the crowd.
I think there's a critical mass of usage/popularity that a software tool needs to sustain itself and I would think that after that point, the returns on popularity are increasingly diminishing. After reading the book "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal, I'm almost convinced that an excessive user base could be harmful to the core maintainers and thus to the project as a whole.
Some language communities can get by with a minuscule percentage of total users. 4% of all developers for example is a sizable amount. I think Emacs is in a pretty good sweet spot.
Wow, looks like lots of interesting talks. Two rewrites in other languages this year. The regex compilation one looks huge. And the search engine and postgres ones both look very useful.
There are always some that differ more than others. I really wonder what the "polyexistential libre/halal" thing is. I remember there once was a talk on how to generalize the different vim-like "modes", instead of just insert/normal he was zooming in and out of various levels of modes; unfortunately I can't find that talk again, does anyone remember what it was called?
https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/07/ that would be this one, Beyond Vim and Emacs: A Scalable UI Paradigm. What an interesting concept. I wonder if it ever panned out, last I checked it was still a quite a bit in progress
it's interesting to see how emacs have seen a renaissance lately with AI there is so many good modes to interact with LLM not the way the other editors does it but more of a Emacs way. for example gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel
It is great to be reminded of the large community Emcas still has.
I am probably in a tiny minority but I wish that Emacs had won the "most popular editor"¹ instead of M$ VsCode
¹ I did read that VsCode is the biggest now but I havent really looked into to it to verify that statement.
> I am probably in a tiny minority but I wish that Emacs had won the "most popular editor"¹ instead of M$ VsCode
Emacs is ~40 years old now, it's lost many popular-votes through its lifetime. VS Code is just the latest in a long list of popular editors. It also lost to the vi-family, to IDEs, to notepad++, to sublime and probably some others. Emacs is not meant to win, and that's ok, because that what makes it great, is also what makes it losing in popularity with the crowd.
I think there's a critical mass of usage/popularity that a software tool needs to sustain itself and I would think that after that point, the returns on popularity are increasingly diminishing. After reading the book "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal, I'm almost convinced that an excessive user base could be harmful to the core maintainers and thus to the project as a whole.
Some language communities can get by with a minuscule percentage of total users. 4% of all developers for example is a sizable amount. I think Emacs is in a pretty good sweet spot.
> Visual Studio Code is used by more than twice as many developers than its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio.
VSCode - 73%, Vim - 21%, Emacs - 4%.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...
Wow, looks like lots of interesting talks. Two rewrites in other languages this year. The regex compilation one looks huge. And the search engine and postgres ones both look very useful.
There are always some that differ more than others. I really wonder what the "polyexistential libre/halal" thing is. I remember there once was a talk on how to generalize the different vim-like "modes", instead of just insert/normal he was zooming in and out of various levels of modes; unfortunately I can't find that talk again, does anyone remember what it was called?
(I did find https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/nangulator/ with the audience comment "This is weirdware in the best sort of way")
https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/07/ that would be this one, Beyond Vim and Emacs: A Scalable UI Paradigm. What an interesting concept. I wonder if it ever panned out, last I checked it was still a quite a bit in progress
Yes! Thank you. That was a mind-blowing talk, showing completely new angles of abstraction.
it's interesting to see how emacs have seen a renaissance lately with AI there is so many good modes to interact with LLM not the way the other editors does it but more of a Emacs way. for example gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel
Glad these are still happening :)