17 ms·

Emacs Survey 2020 Results

145 points by todd8 6y ago

korethr 6y ago
Not quite related, but Century Link's internet filtering on their residential fiber service flags this page as dangerous. I had to click through a cert warning then a Scary Warning Page to reach the actual site. Said filtering is Powered by McAfee(TM), so I'm not sure if it's McAfee or CenturyLink that hates Emacs.
- sitzkrieg 6y ago
  its served over https but not sure if it was redirected, maybe try that directly. seems ridiculous considering
- Buttons840 6y ago
  Chrome says the cert is invalid. Probably the cause.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Looks OK to me in firefox, and Qualys gives it an A+ https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=emacssurvey.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=emacssurvey.o... Looking at CenturtyLink/Level3 on a business line in Washington looks fine too.
    - Buttons840 6y ago
      Hmm. I have CenturyLink as well. Maybe the cert was serving its purpose and notifying me that the connection's been tampered with? I'll check again when I'm on my desktop (instead of mobile).
      - Buttons840 6y ago
        Yep, both Firefox and Chrome report that the cert is bad on my CenturyLink internet.
- kgwxd 6y ago
  Flagged how? Are you using some "enhanced" DNS service they provide?
  - korethr 6y ago
    Whatever the stock configuration on their stock combo modem/router/AP device is. So, probably, yes, some kind of "enhanced" DNS. I know, I know, friends don't let friends use stock firmware or stock ISP gear. But when faced with the infinity of emergencies that has been 2020 when not having infinity time to work on things, low latency even during times of heavy throughput has pushed re-doing the network in this house way down the priority list.
- wiml 6y ago
  What cert are you getting? I (not on Centurylink) see a Let'sEncrypt cert with sha256 BB:37:8D:DE:4E:AB:42:55:30:BE:08:10:A0:11:7A:CD:CB:99:51:91:4B:44:30:3F:E5:F4:76:B0:41:E0:AE:59.
stingraycharles 6y ago
Can I just say that I appreciate this trend of the last few years where opensource projects and organizations start collecting real data on who their users are and how they interact with them? I see it a lot in the Clojure community as well, as with various other communities (such as Emacs). Not only does it provide the people behind the projects better guidance, it also gives me a better idea how my own usage and opinions relate to the wider community. Having said that, one thing I found remarkable from the results of this survey is the proficiency in ELISP. A sizable fraction of the respondents feel proficient enough to write their own packages, a trait which I have yet to find someone in real life for (and I know more than a dozen emacs users). I can’t help but think there must be quite some selection bias going on in the respondents of this survey. :)
- NateEag 6y ago
  FWIW, I don't think of myself as a Lisp programmer, but I still answered that as "able to write my own packages" because I have. Writing a basic package really isn't that difficult.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    +1 to this. I have literally never published a package for emacs, but my init.el could theoretically be one, if I thought anybody else would care or find it useful.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > start collecting real data on who their users are This is a survey of r/emacs. There isn't a strong reason to believe this is reflective of Emacs' actual user base. Who are these people who feel a need to participate in a community based on their text editor? That religion stuff was normally meant as a joke.
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    > Who are these people who feel a need to participate in a community based on their text editor? Eh, guilty as charged. Why do people participate in a community based on anything? Because they are passionate about it. There are detailed communities for every single thing you can think of. People collect matchboxes. There are people who make detailed paintings using Microsoft Excel. Why should Emacs be an exception? And if a survey takes into account people who are passionate about their editor, that's good. Who should it take into account, the people who aren't? That's how you get operating systems that spy upon you all the time and optimize for some silly metric. > That religion stuff was normally meant as a joke. Just because someone makes a joke about it does not mean there cannot be an actual community of grown-ups who treat each other with respect around it. And the Emacs community I have seen so far is very respectful and welcoming, even for things like evil-mode that unify emacs and vi editing paradigms. I encourage everyone who uses emacs or is interested in it to check out r/emacs and associated communities.
cyrialize 6y ago
I haven't used Emacs to program for a while now, but I always use it for org-mode. I don't think org-mode is the best for me in terms of keeping organized notes, I find that I like Joplin's[1] interface more for that. Although I've thought about emulating the interface of Joplin by using folders and treemacs[2]. Org-mode really shines for logging. I use it at work to keep a daily log organized by sprint. Org-mode really gets out of your way and makes logging easy. It is deep and has a ton of features, but the base feature set is really simple and easy to get started with. [1]: https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ [2]: https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs
cannam 6y ago
Very impressed by the proportion of people who primarily use daemon/emacsclient. (I don't, but I always sort of think I should) Surprised, and if I'm honest a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings. Absolutely amazed that so many people report using org-mode daily. Either the whole survey is primarily a survey of org-mode users, rather than Emacs users in general, perhaps because of the HN posting (I get the impression HN loves org-mode) - or nobody else uses Emacs. Even more amazed about the questions on "completion frameworks" and packages for error checking (what?) in both of which the winning answer is something I've never heard of. I shall have to see what they're all about. Finally - oh blimey, everyone reads /r/emacs. Perhaps that explains it all.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  > a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings Why would other people's preferences distress you?
- nextos 6y ago
  Org is quite unique. I use it daily, and I would feel a bit less anxious if the language was standardized as this would facilitate alternative implementations outside Emacs. Right now, the implementation is the standard and that is a bit messy. I don't know about any other language that combines a plain text outliner, keywords, tags, timestamps, hyperlinks and tables. These are exceptionally good primitives to implement a myriad of workflows. And I've left out some incredible features I do not use, like literate programming. Applications like Things or OmniFocus are nice, but they can't adapt to alternative workflows. OmniOutliner was pretty great, though, and motivated some Org features during the GTD craze of late 2000s.
  - tikhonj 6y ago
    I think what makes Org special—just like Emacs—is that it's a small system that can grow. You can customize it however you like, and it's easy to add functionality on top of (or into) the core system. In practice, would standardization hinder this property? It seems like the cost of evolving org-mode would become much higher if there were a formal standard and a number of actively used implementations—we'd have to worry about backwards compatibility, inconsistencies between systems... etc. As it happens, I absolutely would love better support for org-mode workflows in other systems, especially on mobile. (I use Orgzly on Android which is fine but also limited and inflexible.) I could also see a native org-mode implementation making core operations much faster, although the EmacsGCC work is making a real improvement on that front already. But I worry that supporting that would sacrifice the very properties that let org-mode evolve into what it is and to continue evolving even now.
varjag 6y ago
So there we have it: the majority of users do use custom configs rather than starter kits.
- NateEag 6y ago
  Well, the majority of respondents. I'd guess there's a significant selection bias there towards exactly the kinds of users that write their own configurations. Starter kit users seem way less likely to hang out on HN or r/emacs, which is the source of the majority of respondents.
mssundaram 6y ago
Maybe this is a good opportunity to ask some related questions. I'm a Vim (now Neovim) user for most of my life but I'm finally interested in trying org-mode. 1. What's the best way to get Emacs on Mac? I heard that [1] is not a good solution, but I don't know why that is. So far I've used the d12frosted emacs-plus brew tap. 2. Further, does anyone have any resources for learning org-mode using Evil mode? I have Doom installed and it seems to use Evil by default. [1] https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/
- kkylin 6y ago
  I've never heard that about [1], and would be interested in hearing people's reasons as well. I've used it for many years now and have had few problems. The only other version I've used is Mitsuharu Yamamoto's emacs-mac (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/). For my use case (except for tasks requiring a web browser, I spend almost all my time in Emacs, but I don't use many gui features) the two are essentially equivalent.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I tried emacsformacosx and Yamamoto's port when I first started using Emacs on Mac OS, but since version 25 I've found the standard distribution compiled with --with-ns serves my purposes just fine. (I always build my own since I've found neither X toolkits nor distro packagers to reliably produce a stable Emacs, but if you're thinking about Yamamoto's port, building your own is already on the table. Besides, it's not any harder than building any other software, it just takes a while.)
- WWWWH 6y ago
  I use emacsforosx and am perfectly happy with it. Seriously man, don’t worry about it just go for it. If you find out that you really need something that doesn’t have then you can always compile yourself. It’ll be trivial to transfer your set up, so don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.
- adamrt 6y ago
  Make sure you check out magit[1] while your here. I think its my favorite piece of software that exists. I've used it for nearly 10 years. I basically use it as the interface to my projects. It helped me become way more effective in git than I ever was with the command line. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/
varjag 6y ago
What "common" in the languages graph stands for?
- ignoranceprior 6y ago
  I'd guess Common Lisp.
  - varjag 6y ago
    As I suspected - but there's a separate line for "Lisp". Probably filtered out in deduplicating somehow.
jangid 6y ago
The only survey where - number of gnu/linux > number of macos users > number of windows users.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  As a macos user I selected linux because that's where I run emacs(remote servers).
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
I'm surprised the most used programming language is Python. The last time I tried the packages available for doing Python development did not really feel that polished.
djhworld 6y ago
I've been using Emacs for about 3 months now and enjoying it. I'm only just scratching the surface though and not really dived too deep, I find it quite overwhelming tbh, it feels like the text editing part is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Emacs. Org-mode is pretty cool and I love the note capturing feature, I've bound Cmd+N to this feature so I can take notes quickly. One thing that I've not fully figured out yet is how to share notes between my work life and personal life. Sometimes I make notes at work about some cool programming trick or something useful to know, but that stays on my work machine. I don't want work related information to be accessible from my personal machines but I want access to those 'general' notes. Obviously I could set up separate files that sync, but I really like the quick-capture workflow and introducing a "should I save this here or there" type of action would slow that down...
- stinkytaco 6y ago
  If you use separate files for each, I would set up a new capture template, one for work that goes to a work file, one for personal that goes to a personal file. Then it's Cmd+N p (personal notes that save to personal.org) and Cmd+N w or something like that. EDIT: The gist of that is here: https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html
  - throwanem 6y ago
    And some elisp to create and bind a keymap for those capture invocations might look like: (let ((capture-map (make-sparse-keymap))) (global-set-key (kbd "C-n" capture-map) (define-key capture-map (kbd "w") #'(lambda nil (interactive) (org-capture nil "work"))) (define-key capture-map (kbd "h") #'(lambda nil (interactive) (org-capture nil "home")))) Doing it as a separate keymap makes it easier to change the keybindings if you later decide to leave C-n at its default binding of next-line - something I actually recommend, since being able to perform cursor movement with keybindings that don't require moving your hands away from the default position has actually proven a lot faster in my experience than using the arrow keys. Navigation via isearch (C-s forward, C-r backward) is faster still, and something I'd really recommend making some time to try out as a newish Emacs user.
spenczar5 6y ago
I love the effort, but I have to worry about biases in the sampling procedure. 18% of emacs users use doom-emacs, a project which started in 2014? Nearly half use org-mode daily? 80% of users visit r/emacs??? Because of the sloppy survey design, it is pretty hard for me to interpret these results.
- clircle 6y ago
  Frankly, I'm not sure how the survey design could have been improved. You can interpret the results as is. The data collector is not trying to generalize to the population of all Emacs users.
- HerrMonnezza 6y ago
  Why do you consider the survey design "sloppy"? E.g., doom-emacs is a well-known emacs distribution; there nothing weird if 18% of survey respondents use it. Whether the survey respondents are a representative sample of the general emacs population is a different question, and one which is very hard to answer given that we have no other data about people's preferences in emacs. Hopefully, the survey will become more popular with time, so we'll see results approaching the "true" values.
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    That's exactly what I mean by "sloppy" - it's not clear what question this thing answers, because the question wasn't carefully written down ahead of time, so there is no way to really generalize anything here. Because different response methods are pooled together in results without any reweighting, it's not clear how much bias has been introduced vs a hypothetical global emacs population measure. What conclusions do you think you can draw from this? I don't know how to draw any that aren't hedged heavily. 18% for doom seems much higher than I expected - is that because I underestimate it, or because of how the survey was conducted? There's no way to tell, here. Good survey design _does_ exist; it's an extremely intensely studied practice. It's not surprising that a casual internet survey doesn't follow anything resembling modern surveying techniques, but it does make results unclear.
indymike 6y ago
It is kind of surprising how many people have used Emacs for less than a few years. Org mode is a bit of a surprise, but it is very sticky and there is literally nothing like it out there.
srcreigh 6y ago
I am a daily emacs user for about 2 years. I am surprised to see eshell is the most popular shell package. It always seemed like an underdog. Maybe I'll try it out. Happy to see Ivy come on top too, I should give it another shot. I want to see which vimlike packages are most popular. I use a modal editing plugin called Boon which is very simple and effective. I've been following tree-sitter for about a year. ubolonton has recently shipped some great docs for emacs-tree-sitter. I am expecting some innovation to happen in the next year. Paredit for typescript, code transformation commands. We live in exciting times!
innagadadavida 6y ago
magit should’ve been one of the use cases. My main workflow is Xcode, but use magit to stage and push to git. There really is no substitute for it!
susam 6y ago
What stood out to me is that 71% of the respondents disabled tool-bar, 62% disabled menu-bar, 55% disabled splash screen, and 53% disabled the scroll-bar. This shows that the default user interface is perhaps better suited to the novice, not to an experienced user. Shameless plug: I recently wrote a ~/.emacs guide to help beginners to Common Lisp set up Emacs in a DIY fashion rather than just installing the often recommended Portacle: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl . Indeed the first few things this guide indulges in is to set up the user interface as follows before getting into setting up the environment for Common Lisp: ;; Customize user interface. (menu-bar-mode -1) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) (setq inhibit-startup-screen t) (load-theme 'wombat)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- susam 6y ago
  I also wanted to know which themes are popular, so I took the cleaned up CSV from this post and picked the top 30 themes from it with a script. Here are the results: 1. 1034 (14%) default 2. 354 ( 5%) my own 3. 338 ( 5%) doom-one 4. 318 ( 4%) zenburn 5. 208 ( 3%) solarized 6. 202 ( 3%) solarized-dark 7. 194 ( 3%) dracula 8. 181 ( 2%) don't know 9. 163 ( 2%) gruvbox 10. 162 ( 2%) spacemacs 11. 158 ( 2%) spacemacs-dark 12. 153 ( 2%) modus-operandi 13. 120 ( 2%) solarized-light 14. 118 ( 2%) modus-vivendi 15. 117 ( 2%) monokai 16. 116 ( 2%) leuven 17. 111 ( 2%) tango-dark 18. 102 ( 1%) wombat 19. 88 ( 1%) nord 20. 77 ( 1%) doom-theme 21. 67 ( 1%) modus 22. 63 ( 1%) doom-nord 23. 54 ( 1%) spacemacs-light 24. 52 ( 1%) doom-dracula 25. 49 ( 1%) misterioso 26. 45 ( 1%) doom-one-light 27. 44 ( 1%) deeper-blue 28. 41 ( 1%) material 29. 41 ( 1%) doom-gruvbox 30. 40 ( 1%) wheatgrass The column values from left to right are rank, number of votes, votes as percentage of total responses, theme name. The answers in the CSV are in unstructured format and I have not normalized the data a lot to arrive at the list above, so there is some inaccuracy in the results above but despite the inaccuracy it gives a pretty good idea of the relative popularity of themes.

145 points by todd8 6y ago

Not quite related, but Century Link's internet filtering on their residential fiber service flags this page as dangerous. I had to click through a cert warning then a Scary Warning Page to reach the actual site. Said filtering is Powered by McAfee(TM), so I'm not sure if it's McAfee or CenturyLink that hates Emacs.

sitzkrieg 6y ago
its served over https but not sure if it was redirected, maybe try that directly. seems ridiculous considering
Buttons840 6y ago
Chrome says the cert is invalid. Probably the cause.
- iso1631 6y ago
  Looks OK to me in firefox, and Qualys gives it an A+ https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=emacssurvey.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=emacssurvey.o... Looking at CenturtyLink/Level3 on a business line in Washington looks fine too.
  - Buttons840 6y ago
    Hmm. I have CenturyLink as well. Maybe the cert was serving its purpose and notifying me that the connection's been tampered with? I'll check again when I'm on my desktop (instead of mobile).
    - Buttons840 6y ago
      Yep, both Firefox and Chrome report that the cert is bad on my CenturyLink internet.
kgwxd 6y ago
Flagged how? Are you using some "enhanced" DNS service they provide?
- korethr 6y ago
  Whatever the stock configuration on their stock combo modem/router/AP device is. So, probably, yes, some kind of "enhanced" DNS. I know, I know, friends don't let friends use stock firmware or stock ISP gear. But when faced with the infinity of emergencies that has been 2020 when not having infinity time to work on things, low latency even during times of heavy throughput has pushed re-doing the network in this house way down the priority list.
wiml 6y ago
What cert are you getting? I (not on Centurylink) see a Let'sEncrypt cert with sha256 BB:37:8D:DE:4E:AB:42:55:30:BE:08:10:A0:11:7A:CD:CB:99:51:91:4B:44:30:3F:E5:F4:76:B0:41:E0:AE:59.

stingraycharles 6y ago

Can I just say that I appreciate this trend of the last few years where opensource projects and organizations start collecting real data on who their users are and how they interact with them? I see it a lot in the Clojure community as well, as with various other communities (such as Emacs). Not only does it provide the people behind the projects better guidance, it also gives me a better idea how my own usage and opinions relate to the wider community. Having said that, one thing I found remarkable from the results of this survey is the proficiency in ELISP. A sizable fraction of the respondents feel proficient enough to write their own packages, a trait which I have yet to find someone in real life for (and I know more than a dozen emacs users). I can’t help but think there must be quite some selection bias going on in the respondents of this survey. :)

NateEag 6y ago
FWIW, I don't think of myself as a Lisp programmer, but I still answered that as "able to write my own packages" because I have. Writing a basic package really isn't that difficult.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  +1 to this. I have literally never published a package for emacs, but my init.el could theoretically be one, if I thought anybody else would care or find it useful.
roenxi 6y ago
> start collecting real data on who their users are This is a survey of r/emacs. There isn't a strong reason to believe this is reflective of Emacs' actual user base. Who are these people who feel a need to participate in a community based on their text editor? That religion stuff was normally meant as a joke.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  > Who are these people who feel a need to participate in a community based on their text editor? Eh, guilty as charged. Why do people participate in a community based on anything? Because they are passionate about it. There are detailed communities for every single thing you can think of. People collect matchboxes. There are people who make detailed paintings using Microsoft Excel. Why should Emacs be an exception? And if a survey takes into account people who are passionate about their editor, that's good. Who should it take into account, the people who aren't? That's how you get operating systems that spy upon you all the time and optimize for some silly metric. > That religion stuff was normally meant as a joke. Just because someone makes a joke about it does not mean there cannot be an actual community of grown-ups who treat each other with respect around it. And the Emacs community I have seen so far is very respectful and welcoming, even for things like evil-mode that unify emacs and vi editing paradigms. I encourage everyone who uses emacs or is interested in it to check out r/emacs and associated communities.

cyrialize 6y ago

I haven't used Emacs to program for a while now, but I always use it for org-mode. I don't think org-mode is the best for me in terms of keeping organized notes, I find that I like Joplin's[1] interface more for that. Although I've thought about emulating the interface of Joplin by using folders and treemacs[2]. Org-mode really shines for logging. I use it at work to keep a daily log organized by sprint. Org-mode really gets out of your way and makes logging easy. It is deep and has a ton of features, but the base feature set is really simple and easy to get started with. [1]: https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ [2]: https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs

cannam 6y ago

Very impressed by the proportion of people who primarily use daemon/emacsclient. (I don't, but I always sort of think I should) Surprised, and if I'm honest a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings. Absolutely amazed that so many people report using org-mode daily. Either the whole survey is primarily a survey of org-mode users, rather than Emacs users in general, perhaps because of the HN posting (I get the impression HN loves org-mode) - or nobody else uses Emacs. Even more amazed about the questions on "completion frameworks" and packages for error checking (what?) in both of which the winning answer is something I've never heard of. I shall have to see what they're all about. Finally - oh blimey, everyone reads /r/emacs. Perhaps that explains it all.

mssundaram 6y ago
> a little distressed, to see about a third of respondents use vi keybindings Why would other people's preferences distress you?
nextos 6y ago
Org is quite unique. I use it daily, and I would feel a bit less anxious if the language was standardized as this would facilitate alternative implementations outside Emacs. Right now, the implementation is the standard and that is a bit messy. I don't know about any other language that combines a plain text outliner, keywords, tags, timestamps, hyperlinks and tables. These are exceptionally good primitives to implement a myriad of workflows. And I've left out some incredible features I do not use, like literate programming. Applications like Things or OmniFocus are nice, but they can't adapt to alternative workflows. OmniOutliner was pretty great, though, and motivated some Org features during the GTD craze of late 2000s.
- tikhonj 6y ago
  I think what makes Org special—just like Emacs—is that it's a small system that can grow. You can customize it however you like, and it's easy to add functionality on top of (or into) the core system. In practice, would standardization hinder this property? It seems like the cost of evolving org-mode would become much higher if there were a formal standard and a number of actively used implementations—we'd have to worry about backwards compatibility, inconsistencies between systems... etc. As it happens, I absolutely would love better support for org-mode workflows in other systems, especially on mobile. (I use Orgzly on Android which is fine but also limited and inflexible.) I could also see a native org-mode implementation making core operations much faster, although the EmacsGCC work is making a real improvement on that front already. But I worry that supporting that would sacrifice the very properties that let org-mode evolve into what it is and to continue evolving even now.

varjag 6y ago

So there we have it: the majority of users do use custom configs rather than starter kits.

NateEag 6y ago
Well, the majority of respondents. I'd guess there's a significant selection bias there towards exactly the kinds of users that write their own configurations. Starter kit users seem way less likely to hang out on HN or r/emacs, which is the source of the majority of respondents.

mssundaram 6y ago

Maybe this is a good opportunity to ask some related questions. I'm a Vim (now Neovim) user for most of my life but I'm finally interested in trying org-mode. 1. What's the best way to get Emacs on Mac? I heard that [1] is not a good solution, but I don't know why that is. So far I've used the d12frosted emacs-plus brew tap. 2. Further, does anyone have any resources for learning org-mode using Evil mode? I have Doom installed and it seems to use Evil by default. [1] https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/

kkylin 6y ago
I've never heard that about [1], and would be interested in hearing people's reasons as well. I've used it for many years now and have had few problems. The only other version I've used is Mitsuharu Yamamoto's emacs-mac (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/). For my use case (except for tasks requiring a web browser, I spend almost all my time in Emacs, but I don't use many gui features) the two are essentially equivalent.
- throwanem 6y ago
  I tried emacsformacosx and Yamamoto's port when I first started using Emacs on Mac OS, but since version 25 I've found the standard distribution compiled with --with-ns serves my purposes just fine. (I always build my own since I've found neither X toolkits nor distro packagers to reliably produce a stable Emacs, but if you're thinking about Yamamoto's port, building your own is already on the table. Besides, it's not any harder than building any other software, it just takes a while.)
WWWWH 6y ago
I use emacsforosx and am perfectly happy with it. Seriously man, don’t worry about it just go for it. If you find out that you really need something that doesn’t have then you can always compile yourself. It’ll be trivial to transfer your set up, so don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.
adamrt 6y ago
Make sure you check out magit[1] while your here. I think its my favorite piece of software that exists. I've used it for nearly 10 years. I basically use it as the interface to my projects. It helped me become way more effective in git than I ever was with the command line. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/

varjag 6y ago

What "common" in the languages graph stands for?

ignoranceprior 6y ago
I'd guess Common Lisp.
- varjag 6y ago
  As I suspected - but there's a separate line for "Lisp". Probably filtered out in deduplicating somehow.

jangid 6y ago

The only survey where - number of gnu/linux > number of macos users > number of windows users.

Scarbutt 6y ago
As a macos user I selected linux because that's where I run emacs(remote servers).

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

I'm surprised the most used programming language is Python. The last time I tried the packages available for doing Python development did not really feel that polished.

djhworld 6y ago

I've been using Emacs for about 3 months now and enjoying it. I'm only just scratching the surface though and not really dived too deep, I find it quite overwhelming tbh, it feels like the text editing part is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Emacs. Org-mode is pretty cool and I love the note capturing feature, I've bound Cmd+N to this feature so I can take notes quickly. One thing that I've not fully figured out yet is how to share notes between my work life and personal life. Sometimes I make notes at work about some cool programming trick or something useful to know, but that stays on my work machine. I don't want work related information to be accessible from my personal machines but I want access to those 'general' notes. Obviously I could set up separate files that sync, but I really like the quick-capture workflow and introducing a "should I save this here or there" type of action would slow that down...

stinkytaco 6y ago
If you use separate files for each, I would set up a new capture template, one for work that goes to a work file, one for personal that goes to a personal file. Then it's Cmd+N p (personal notes that save to personal.org) and Cmd+N w or something like that. EDIT: The gist of that is here: https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html
- throwanem 6y ago
  And some elisp to create and bind a keymap for those capture invocations might look like: (let ((capture-map (make-sparse-keymap))) (global-set-key (kbd "C-n" capture-map) (define-key capture-map (kbd "w") #'(lambda nil (interactive) (org-capture nil "work"))) (define-key capture-map (kbd "h") #'(lambda nil (interactive) (org-capture nil "home")))) Doing it as a separate keymap makes it easier to change the keybindings if you later decide to leave C-n at its default binding of next-line - something I actually recommend, since being able to perform cursor movement with keybindings that don't require moving your hands away from the default position has actually proven a lot faster in my experience than using the arrow keys. Navigation via isearch (C-s forward, C-r backward) is faster still, and something I'd really recommend making some time to try out as a newish Emacs user.

spenczar5 6y ago

I love the effort, but I have to worry about biases in the sampling procedure. 18% of emacs users use doom-emacs, a project which started in 2014? Nearly half use org-mode daily? 80% of users visit r/emacs??? Because of the sloppy survey design, it is pretty hard for me to interpret these results.

clircle 6y ago
Frankly, I'm not sure how the survey design could have been improved. You can interpret the results as is. The data collector is not trying to generalize to the population of all Emacs users.
HerrMonnezza 6y ago
Why do you consider the survey design "sloppy"? E.g., doom-emacs is a well-known emacs distribution; there nothing weird if 18% of survey respondents use it. Whether the survey respondents are a representative sample of the general emacs population is a different question, and one which is very hard to answer given that we have no other data about people's preferences in emacs. Hopefully, the survey will become more popular with time, so we'll see results approaching the "true" values.
- spenczar5 6y ago
  That's exactly what I mean by "sloppy" - it's not clear what question this thing answers, because the question wasn't carefully written down ahead of time, so there is no way to really generalize anything here. Because different response methods are pooled together in results without any reweighting, it's not clear how much bias has been introduced vs a hypothetical global emacs population measure. What conclusions do you think you can draw from this? I don't know how to draw any that aren't hedged heavily. 18% for doom seems much higher than I expected - is that because I underestimate it, or because of how the survey was conducted? There's no way to tell, here. Good survey design _does_ exist; it's an extremely intensely studied practice. It's not surprising that a casual internet survey doesn't follow anything resembling modern surveying techniques, but it does make results unclear.

indymike 6y ago

It is kind of surprising how many people have used Emacs for less than a few years. Org mode is a bit of a surprise, but it is very sticky and there is literally nothing like it out there.

srcreigh 6y ago

I am a daily emacs user for about 2 years. I am surprised to see eshell is the most popular shell package. It always seemed like an underdog. Maybe I'll try it out. Happy to see Ivy come on top too, I should give it another shot. I want to see which vimlike packages are most popular. I use a modal editing plugin called Boon which is very simple and effective. I've been following tree-sitter for about a year. ubolonton has recently shipped some great docs for emacs-tree-sitter. I am expecting some innovation to happen in the next year. Paredit for typescript, code transformation commands. We live in exciting times!

innagadadavida 6y ago

magit should’ve been one of the use cases. My main workflow is Xcode, but use magit to stage and push to git. There really is no substitute for it!

susam 6y ago

What stood out to me is that 71% of the respondents disabled tool-bar, 62% disabled menu-bar, 55% disabled splash screen, and 53% disabled the scroll-bar. This shows that the default user interface is perhaps better suited to the novice, not to an experienced user. Shameless plug: I recently wrote a ~/.emacs guide to help beginners to Common Lisp set up Emacs in a DIY fashion rather than just installing the often recommended Portacle: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl . Indeed the first few things this guide indulges in is to set up the user interface as follows before getting into setting up the environment for Common Lisp: ;; Customize user interface. (menu-bar-mode -1) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) (setq inhibit-startup-screen t) (load-theme 'wombat)

deleted 6y ago
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susam 6y ago
I also wanted to know which themes are popular, so I took the cleaned up CSV from this post and picked the top 30 themes from it with a script. Here are the results: 1. 1034 (14%) default 2. 354 ( 5%) my own 3. 338 ( 5%) doom-one 4. 318 ( 4%) zenburn 5. 208 ( 3%) solarized 6. 202 ( 3%) solarized-dark 7. 194 ( 3%) dracula 8. 181 ( 2%) don't know 9. 163 ( 2%) gruvbox 10. 162 ( 2%) spacemacs 11. 158 ( 2%) spacemacs-dark 12. 153 ( 2%) modus-operandi 13. 120 ( 2%) solarized-light 14. 118 ( 2%) modus-vivendi 15. 117 ( 2%) monokai 16. 116 ( 2%) leuven 17. 111 ( 2%) tango-dark 18. 102 ( 1%) wombat 19. 88 ( 1%) nord 20. 77 ( 1%) doom-theme 21. 67 ( 1%) modus 22. 63 ( 1%) doom-nord 23. 54 ( 1%) spacemacs-light 24. 52 ( 1%) doom-dracula 25. 49 ( 1%) misterioso 26. 45 ( 1%) doom-one-light 27. 44 ( 1%) deeper-blue 28. 41 ( 1%) material 29. 41 ( 1%) doom-gruvbox 30. 40 ( 1%) wheatgrass The column values from left to right are rank, number of votes, votes as percentage of total responses, theme name. The answers in the CSV are in unstructured format and I have not normalized the data a lot to arrive at the list above, so there is some inaccuracy in the results above but despite the inaccuracy it gives a pretty good idea of the relative popularity of themes.