In the nineties, emacs used to be the #1 text editor. On Unix. Which reached a tiny fraction of a percent of programmers. In that community, it felt overwhelmin

In the nineties, emacs used to be the #1 text editor. On Unix. Which reached a tiny fraction of a percent of programmers. In that community, it felt overwhelmingly popular (competing with vi who was in a close second). Ironically, of the two, emacs was the user-friendly alternative. Today, Linux is the most popular operating system on the planet (if you don't believe me, count up those Android phones, network routers, and embedded devices). Even so, emacs runs on Windows and MacOS. That market is many orders of magnitude bigger. It has a tiny fraction of a percent penetration in the market of "devices with a CPU." So it feels very niche. There are no figures I'm aware of for number of users, but it's not at all clear to me how to compare: (tiny market) · (large percentage) versus (huge market) · (tiny percentage) Even as estimates. Qualitatively, it feels different. The level of "emacs community" has gone down, but "community" isn't about quantity, and can be reached with a dozen tight-nit users.