4 ms·

Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.

by mmooss 2y ago

krykp 2y ago
With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.
- openrisk 2y ago
  Neovim feels indeed the proper future-proof evolution of a standard. Its still a bit cumbersome to setup (fonts, lots of plugins to configure, opinionated and overly decorated UI etc.). The acid test of maturity is the dry functionality you get out of the box in a fresh linux. It should be "just right", introducing the new thinking and functionality of neovim without getting in the way.
  - aktau 2y ago
    I actually like `nvim --clean`, which is just the basics. Early on in the Neovim project, a lot of heirloom defaults were changed to be more modern, resulting in a better (IMHO) out-of-the-box experience. I use `nvim --clean` as my man-page viewer: MANPAGER=nvim --clean -c "colo sorbet" +Man! Startup speed is blistering. My current config is pretty stable, and not that large. But if it were causing issues, I'd seriously consider only doing LSP setup, which is not that onerous with the latest APIs (it was already fairly easy with `vim.lsp.start`, but `vim.lsp.config` and `vim.lsp.enable` make it easier still: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html).
- volemo 2y ago
  I wonder, will there be something to emacs, as nvim is to vim?
  - bananapub 2y ago
    sacrificing all existing elisp code makes a new editor worthless, maintaining compatibility makes it extraordinarily hard to get anywhere.
  - kdtsh 2y ago
    There’s (arguably) an argument to be made that Emacs configuration distributions fit that niche - Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude provide varying flavours for different kinds of Emacs users. Apart from that, I don’t really know what an application would be to Emacs as nvim is to Vim. It’s more like nvim is to Vim what Emacs is to nano, except Emacs came first.
  - sevensor 2y ago
    This already happened, decades ago. Xemacs was widely deployed for a while. For that matter, vim is the most popular of several editors that did this to vi. (Elvis, stevie, nvi, others probably.) At any rate, I think Xemacs is still more or less maintained, but I haven’t seen anybody use it in decades.
  - LeonidasXIV 2y ago
    Let's not forget that GNU Emacs also had his competitor, XEmacs which spurred GNU Emacs to improve. Similar with GCC and EGCS where the EGCS later became the new GCC.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    Emacs seems to be a local maximum that is difficult to overcome. An entire Lisp Machine environment would be better, but it would be a tremendous undertaking and the specialists, i.e. emacs devs, don't seem to be interested in such a thing. A multithreaded version of emacs would also be an interesting addition; I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.
    - karthink 2y ago
      > I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them. Everyone including the maintainers would like this to happen. The arguments against it are technical hurdles. Emacs is a large ball of global state and the lisp evaluator hooks into everything, including the display engine, so it's not clear to anyone how to disentangle things to the point where the interpreter lock can be released.
eviks 2y ago
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tools https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is
- mmooss 2y ago
  Thanks. In more detail: Visual Studio Code 73.6% Visual Studio 29.3% IntelliJ IDEA 26.8% Notepad++ 23.9% Vim 21.6% Android Studio 16.1% PyCharm 15.1% Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab 12.8% Neovim 12.5% ... Emacs 4.2% ... Spacemacs 0.4% So Vim + Neovim = 34.1%, essentially second to Visual Studio, the overwhelming leader.
  - imp0cat 2y ago
    I wonder why is Spacemacs listed as a separate entry?
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    I'm pleasantly surprised Notepad++ is so high up.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    What this doesn't show is people using vscode/vs with neovim driver or vim key bindings. The vim "backend" percentage is going to be significant.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    StackOverflow isn't representative. It was always skewed towards .NET world (and thus VS). I assume this is the case because the founders were prominent .NET personalities.
    - fomine3 2y ago
      There's no representative community though
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.

by mmooss 2y ago

Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.

krykp 2y ago

With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.

openrisk 2y ago
Neovim feels indeed the proper future-proof evolution of a standard. Its still a bit cumbersome to setup (fonts, lots of plugins to configure, opinionated and overly decorated UI etc.). The acid test of maturity is the dry functionality you get out of the box in a fresh linux. It should be "just right", introducing the new thinking and functionality of neovim without getting in the way.
- aktau 2y ago
  I actually like `nvim --clean`, which is just the basics. Early on in the Neovim project, a lot of heirloom defaults were changed to be more modern, resulting in a better (IMHO) out-of-the-box experience. I use `nvim --clean` as my man-page viewer: MANPAGER=nvim --clean -c "colo sorbet" +Man! Startup speed is blistering. My current config is pretty stable, and not that large. But if it were causing issues, I'd seriously consider only doing LSP setup, which is not that onerous with the latest APIs (it was already fairly easy with `vim.lsp.start`, but `vim.lsp.config` and `vim.lsp.enable` make it easier still: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html).
volemo 2y ago
I wonder, will there be something to emacs, as nvim is to vim?
- bananapub 2y ago
  sacrificing all existing elisp code makes a new editor worthless, maintaining compatibility makes it extraordinarily hard to get anywhere.
- kdtsh 2y ago
  There’s (arguably) an argument to be made that Emacs configuration distributions fit that niche - Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude provide varying flavours for different kinds of Emacs users. Apart from that, I don’t really know what an application would be to Emacs as nvim is to Vim. It’s more like nvim is to Vim what Emacs is to nano, except Emacs came first.
- sevensor 2y ago
  This already happened, decades ago. Xemacs was widely deployed for a while. For that matter, vim is the most popular of several editors that did this to vi. (Elvis, stevie, nvi, others probably.) At any rate, I think Xemacs is still more or less maintained, but I haven’t seen anybody use it in decades.
- LeonidasXIV 2y ago
  Let's not forget that GNU Emacs also had his competitor, XEmacs which spurred GNU Emacs to improve. Similar with GCC and EGCS where the EGCS later became the new GCC.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Emacs seems to be a local maximum that is difficult to overcome. An entire Lisp Machine environment would be better, but it would be a tremendous undertaking and the specialists, i.e. emacs devs, don't seem to be interested in such a thing. A multithreaded version of emacs would also be an interesting addition; I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.
  - karthink 2y ago
    > I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them. Everyone including the maintainers would like this to happen. The arguments against it are technical hurdles. Emacs is a large ball of global state and the lisp evaluator hooks into everything, including the display engine, so it's not clear to anyone how to disentangle things to the point where the interpreter lock can be released.

eviks 2y ago

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tools https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is

mmooss 2y ago
Thanks. In more detail: Visual Studio Code 73.6% Visual Studio 29.3% IntelliJ IDEA 26.8% Notepad++ 23.9% Vim 21.6% Android Studio 16.1% PyCharm 15.1% Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab 12.8% Neovim 12.5% ... Emacs 4.2% ... Spacemacs 0.4% So Vim + Neovim = 34.1%, essentially second to Visual Studio, the overwhelming leader.
- imp0cat 2y ago
  I wonder why is Spacemacs listed as a separate entry?
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I'm pleasantly surprised Notepad++ is so high up.
- viraptor 2y ago
  What this doesn't show is people using vscode/vs with neovim driver or vim key bindings. The vim "backend" percentage is going to be significant.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  StackOverflow isn't representative. It was always skewed towards .NET world (and thus VS). I assume this is the case because the founders were prominent .NET personalities.
  - fomine3 2y ago
    There's no representative community though
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago