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Emacs is certainly "dying" in the sense that I don't see any undergraduates using it. 20 years ago students were mostly split between vim and emacs. As time wen

Emacs is certainly "dying" in the sense that I don't see any undergraduates using it. 20 years ago students were mostly split between vim and emacs. As time went by, both have dropped. Vim has picked up again in the last 8 years or so, helped by neovim, but I don't think I've seen an undergraduate (out of 100 students per year) using Emacs for about 5 years. My belief (from listening to students) is that vim using highly non-standard keys is seeing as a worth-while tradeoff for the extra editing power it provides. With emacs, it's not clear there is any advantage to emacs not using the standard ctrl+x,c,v,n,s,f, etc.

thelastparadise 3y ago
The power of emacs is not the default keybindings.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Which can be made CUA (ctrl-S, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, etc.) easily if one's on Windows...
- pastage 3y ago
  The same has been said about VS code. I.e it is just a husk that you need to modify to something useful. This makes them useless to many. Sane defaults is important and should be there.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I don't know (or care) if Emacs is dying, but that is a point suggesting death is on the way. We have in Emacs an editor where the default keybindings aren't great (literally designed for keyboards that no longer exist). The configuration language is Elisp, which is not a great language (being a lisp is great, but by lisp standards it is eclipsed by Common lisp or Clojure depending on personal preferences). The overall feel of the editor with lots of extensions is a bit patchwork and unprofessional. The model of editing text is a relic from a time when multiple threads didn't exist and window managers were not yet a thing. I love Emacs to death and it isn't leaving my hands until they are cold and dead; but for the life of me I don't see why anyone should invest the time to learn Emacs. The greater programming community would be better off letting it die then rebuilding something similar with different defaults. All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    >All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions. Yes, we call those modes.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      They can't make effective decisions about the modes without understanding base Emacs. And base Emacs is pretty awful. New users are better off using a text editor with sane defaults. Then they don't even need to build their own text editor. A lot of what makes Emacs good to use are modes that bring it up to parity with things like vim and Visual Studio.
      - llm_trw 3y ago
        No, a lot of what makes idiots quit emacs is trying to bring it up to parity with vim and Visual Studio. What makes emacs great are modes like tramp, dried, magit and org-mode which turn it into a portable operating system from the year 3000.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    I've walked around editors / IDE etc and the flaws of emacs still don't overcome the benefits. I'd be curious to see some deep improvements though, but it won't matter much if not.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  I would argue it is. Not because of Emacs itself though, but because they are the default gnu readline keybindings. This means that by learning these, one can use them in almost every application on every platform that has a "text input field" type component. Browsers, Adobe software, most native macOS software, any REPL such as python, etc. Even in the shell, ones workflow is just so much better after learning these. (Yes, I am aware that vim input mode exists). But then again, that's as much of emacs that I bothered to learn... I do see emacs often used in competitive programming, mostly by undergrads too. But of course, that is already a very small subset of all undergrads.
alerighi 3y ago
To me the popularity of vim is also due that it's a small and fast editor to be used in the cli with more featires than nano, while emacs mostly is a gui application. This makes it ideal to edit configuration files or small scripts on a server. I use it mostly for this reason, and my coworkers use it for the same reason, while I use vscode for programming.
- heelix 3y ago
  Also, when one has to reach out to unfamiliar servers, I can always count on some form of VI being present. The same is not true for Emacs.
  - medstrom 3y ago
    This trope is older than I am. And the standard answer is equally old: you wouldn't use the remote server's emacs, you would connect to the remote server from inside your own local emacs.
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      Seriously people. Tramp mode is your friend. It can even two two or more hops.
      - BillyTheMage 3y ago
        It's even more seamless than using the other machine's Emacs. Sometimes I have to remind myself which things are on which machine.
        Gud 3y ago
        Does anyone have any idea how to do this with vim? I guess it would be possible with ssh maybe?
        mr_mitm 3y ago
llm_trw 3y ago
They were using it because they were forced to. I remember all the complaints people had why they couldn't use a real operating system and text editor for their code when they first showed up to classes.
agumonkey 3y ago
if you do simple edit / copypaste / save, emacs has no value if you do anything complex, it starts to have some, just like lisps in a way now i can understand why emacs is not used in the days of vscode and jupiter notebooks, but weirdly enough, the visible emacs community is growing (more confs, more attendance), which honestly makes me wonder why
usrusr 3y ago
I share that impression. Emacs only lives on as an imaginary yang to vim. vim has found a certain niche as a skill that functions through a text mode ssh because when you use it as a minimalistic editor that's exactly what it is. Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" and so people who have their IDE slot already taken will naturally gravitate to vim if nano is not enough. Some of those might eventually switch you vim completely, but it's also happy in the middle ground situation. It certainly comes as a surprise, but it turns out that vim offers a more inviting on-ramp than emacs.
- iLemming 3y ago
  > Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" People want to do everything in Emacs not because it forces them to, but because it allows you to do a bunch of things in a very cohesive manner. Trust me, taking notes while reading a PDF, jumping from a specific page to your notes and vice-versa, linking a YouTube video to the specific note, extracting subtitles for that video, feeding the entire transcription to ChatGPT to generate the summary for that vid, then composing Anki card content and pushing it to your Anki collection for that subject. Or even doing something utterly stupid like forcing Google Translate to expand numbers to their written form:https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_surely_not_joking_when_they_say_emacs/kkbpuyg https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_sur.... That all, is extremely empowering and liberating. People often say: "These workflows you describe sound amazing, but I don't see myself doing them." Before Emacs, I wouldn't have considered doing things like that in a single app. I would have tried finding a specialized app for each thing. Becoming an Emacs hacker changes your mindset. Why settle for anything else when I can run it with a simple keystroke? And it's not just about saving time or not losing focus. It's just inexplicable fun to have refined control over text. Any kind of text.
ghusto 3y ago
I thought _emacs_ had the standard shortcuts and vim was weird. After all, I can ctrl-a (beginning of line), ctrl-e (end of line), modifier-b (back one word), etc. all in my terminal, as well as most non-Windows desktops (including MacOS).
iLemming 3y ago
Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. The one exception is Emacs. Pretty much every other IDE fails to comprehensively replicate Vim. Unless it's Vim/Neovim, vim-mode in all of them is just that - an emulation. However, Evil mode in Emacs feels much more natural. Sometimes, you forget that it's an afterthought, an extension, and not a built-in functionality. Just that alone speaks volumes about the extensibility of Emacs. While Evil-mode (the Extensible VI Layer for Emacs) obviously is not the most important or even built-in feature of Emacs, as a nerd and a computer programmer, if I discovered that there's a civilian plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering. And as a die-hard Vimmer, one day I had a revelation - I realized that Emacs vims better than Vim and Neovim. While also opening possibilities for many, many other things.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  > None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. I'm been a vi/vim user for 40 years, and VSCode's emulation is good enough for me. Given the number of installs I'd say it's good enough for a lot of people. But I still go back to vim over vscode. That's because VSCode can be an absolute dog. I've seen it take 10 seconds to respond to a keystroke on a Thankpad-X1 with 32GB of RAM. The syntax error highlighting can take minutes to catch up, "go to definition" fines up a spinner for so long it's literally faster to find it yourself. Meanwhile, vim is instantaneous at just about everything. It may not be pretty or as helpful, but when code is flowing from the fingers it gets out of the way and lets it happen.
  - iLemming 3y ago
    > VSCode's emulation is good enough for me Oh come on. It doesn't even "vimify" things in other than the file editor, which basically is the same for every app with vim emulation. Vim feels amazing in Neovim. In other IDEs, if you aspire to be an "advanced vimmer", you'd quickly hit a bunch of limitations. The most significant one is that you cannot vimify things in every tool window In Emacs, you can "Evilify" pretty much any buffer, allowing vim-navigation use in Dired and Magit, and anywhere else (even in the minibuffer). You also have the ability to extend any command, adding extra features like custom ex-commands, for instance. As far as I know, such functionality is not even available in vanilla Vim. Hoping for similar features in IDEAVim or the VSCode Vim plugins is wishful thinking. Besides, even with barebones, after installing Vim plugin in VSCode (I tried multiple) there's some noticeable latency, while my Emacs instance, with over 300 added plugins still feels zippy.

thelastparadise 3y ago

The power of emacs is not the default keybindings.

wiz21c 3y ago
Which can be made CUA (ctrl-S, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, etc.) easily if one's on Windows...
pastage 3y ago
The same has been said about VS code. I.e it is just a husk that you need to modify to something useful. This makes them useless to many. Sane defaults is important and should be there.
roenxi 3y ago
I don't know (or care) if Emacs is dying, but that is a point suggesting death is on the way. We have in Emacs an editor where the default keybindings aren't great (literally designed for keyboards that no longer exist). The configuration language is Elisp, which is not a great language (being a lisp is great, but by lisp standards it is eclipsed by Common lisp or Clojure depending on personal preferences). The overall feel of the editor with lots of extensions is a bit patchwork and unprofessional. The model of editing text is a relic from a time when multiple threads didn't exist and window managers were not yet a thing. I love Emacs to death and it isn't leaving my hands until they are cold and dead; but for the life of me I don't see why anyone should invest the time to learn Emacs. The greater programming community would be better off letting it die then rebuilding something similar with different defaults. All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions.
- llm_trw 3y ago
  >All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions. Yes, we call those modes.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    They can't make effective decisions about the modes without understanding base Emacs. And base Emacs is pretty awful. New users are better off using a text editor with sane defaults. Then they don't even need to build their own text editor. A lot of what makes Emacs good to use are modes that bring it up to parity with things like vim and Visual Studio.
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      No, a lot of what makes idiots quit emacs is trying to bring it up to parity with vim and Visual Studio. What makes emacs great are modes like tramp, dried, magit and org-mode which turn it into a portable operating system from the year 3000.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I've walked around editors / IDE etc and the flaws of emacs still don't overcome the benefits. I'd be curious to see some deep improvements though, but it won't matter much if not.
sureglymop 3y ago
I would argue it is. Not because of Emacs itself though, but because they are the default gnu readline keybindings. This means that by learning these, one can use them in almost every application on every platform that has a "text input field" type component. Browsers, Adobe software, most native macOS software, any REPL such as python, etc. Even in the shell, ones workflow is just so much better after learning these. (Yes, I am aware that vim input mode exists). But then again, that's as much of emacs that I bothered to learn... I do see emacs often used in competitive programming, mostly by undergrads too. But of course, that is already a very small subset of all undergrads.

alerighi 3y ago

To me the popularity of vim is also due that it's a small and fast editor to be used in the cli with more featires than nano, while emacs mostly is a gui application. This makes it ideal to edit configuration files or small scripts on a server. I use it mostly for this reason, and my coworkers use it for the same reason, while I use vscode for programming.

heelix 3y ago
Also, when one has to reach out to unfamiliar servers, I can always count on some form of VI being present. The same is not true for Emacs.
- medstrom 3y ago
  This trope is older than I am. And the standard answer is equally old: you wouldn't use the remote server's emacs, you would connect to the remote server from inside your own local emacs.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Seriously people. Tramp mode is your friend. It can even two two or more hops.
    - BillyTheMage 3y ago
      It's even more seamless than using the other machine's Emacs. Sometimes I have to remind myself which things are on which machine.
      - Gud 3y ago
        Does anyone have any idea how to do this with vim? I guess it would be possible with ssh maybe?
        mr_mitm 3y ago

llm_trw 3y ago

They were using it because they were forced to. I remember all the complaints people had why they couldn't use a real operating system and text editor for their code when they first showed up to classes.

agumonkey 3y ago

if you do simple edit / copypaste / save, emacs has no value if you do anything complex, it starts to have some, just like lisps in a way now i can understand why emacs is not used in the days of vscode and jupiter notebooks, but weirdly enough, the visible emacs community is growing (more confs, more attendance), which honestly makes me wonder why

usrusr 3y ago

I share that impression. Emacs only lives on as an imaginary yang to vim. vim has found a certain niche as a skill that functions through a text mode ssh because when you use it as a minimalistic editor that's exactly what it is. Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" and so people who have their IDE slot already taken will naturally gravitate to vim if nano is not enough. Some of those might eventually switch you vim completely, but it's also happy in the middle ground situation. It certainly comes as a surprise, but it turns out that vim offers a more inviting on-ramp than emacs.

iLemming 3y ago
> Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" People want to do everything in Emacs not because it forces them to, but because it allows you to do a bunch of things in a very cohesive manner. Trust me, taking notes while reading a PDF, jumping from a specific page to your notes and vice-versa, linking a YouTube video to the specific note, extracting subtitles for that video, feeding the entire transcription to ChatGPT to generate the summary for that vid, then composing Anki card content and pushing it to your Anki collection for that subject. Or even doing something utterly stupid like forcing Google Translate to expand numbers to their written form:https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_surely_not_joking_when_they_say_emacs/kkbpuyg https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_sur.... That all, is extremely empowering and liberating. People often say: "These workflows you describe sound amazing, but I don't see myself doing them." Before Emacs, I wouldn't have considered doing things like that in a single app. I would have tried finding a specialized app for each thing. Becoming an Emacs hacker changes your mindset. Why settle for anything else when I can run it with a simple keystroke? And it's not just about saving time or not losing focus. It's just inexplicable fun to have refined control over text. Any kind of text.

ghusto 3y ago

I thought _emacs_ had the standard shortcuts and vim was weird. After all, I can ctrl-a (beginning of line), ctrl-e (end of line), modifier-b (back one word), etc. all in my terminal, as well as most non-Windows desktops (including MacOS).

iLemming 3y ago

Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. The one exception is Emacs. Pretty much every other IDE fails to comprehensively replicate Vim. Unless it's Vim/Neovim, vim-mode in all of them is just that - an emulation. However, Evil mode in Emacs feels much more natural. Sometimes, you forget that it's an afterthought, an extension, and not a built-in functionality. Just that alone speaks volumes about the extensibility of Emacs. While Evil-mode (the Extensible VI Layer for Emacs) obviously is not the most important or even built-in feature of Emacs, as a nerd and a computer programmer, if I discovered that there's a civilian plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering. And as a die-hard Vimmer, one day I had a revelation - I realized that Emacs vims better than Vim and Neovim. While also opening possibilities for many, many other things.

rstuart4133 3y ago
> None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. I'm been a vi/vim user for 40 years, and VSCode's emulation is good enough for me. Given the number of installs I'd say it's good enough for a lot of people. But I still go back to vim over vscode. That's because VSCode can be an absolute dog. I've seen it take 10 seconds to respond to a keystroke on a Thankpad-X1 with 32GB of RAM. The syntax error highlighting can take minutes to catch up, "go to definition" fines up a spinner for so long it's literally faster to find it yourself. Meanwhile, vim is instantaneous at just about everything. It may not be pretty or as helpful, but when code is flowing from the fingers it gets out of the way and lets it happen.
- iLemming 3y ago
  > VSCode's emulation is good enough for me Oh come on. It doesn't even "vimify" things in other than the file editor, which basically is the same for every app with vim emulation. Vim feels amazing in Neovim. In other IDEs, if you aspire to be an "advanced vimmer", you'd quickly hit a bunch of limitations. The most significant one is that you cannot vimify things in every tool window In Emacs, you can "Evilify" pretty much any buffer, allowing vim-navigation use in Dired and Magit, and anywhere else (even in the minibuffer). You also have the ability to extend any command, adding extra features like custom ex-commands, for instance. As far as I know, such functionality is not even available in vanilla Vim. Hoping for similar features in IDEAVim or the VSCode Vim plugins is wishful thinking. Besides, even with barebones, after installing Vim plugin in VSCode (I tried multiple) there's some noticeable latency, while my Emacs instance, with over 300 added plugins still feels zippy.