It is difficult to tell if the emacs user base is "dying" - all I can do is comment from experience. I have been a programmer for 25+ years now. In the "early" days, Emacs and Vi were two of the main contenders - because Unix was one of the most popular OS's (I used VAX's for a while - but neither was available there). When IBM/Microsoft put PC's on everybodies desks, the proliferation of "other" editors started to explode.

In my working experience, once PC's hit the desktop, Emacs or Vi were NEVER the popular editor. So for at least the last 20+ years, I have been virtually the only user in the organisation that I was currently working for at the time using Emacs (or an Emacs look-alike - in the early days of PC's, before DJ Delorie came along, you used things like "micro Emacs" if you were an Emacs junkie). My current organisation has about 30 - 40 programmers across a number of small projects - there are only two of us using Emacs :-)

So whether you can define Emacs as dying out - or just holding it's own is a matter of perspective :-) Certainly you are likely to find a much higher user base with OS's such as Debian's distribution of Linux - but I haven't ever worked for an organisation that put machines running Linux on our desks - managers like to play safe by spending lots of money with Microsoft and getting the lowest common denominator on everybodies desk...

Pete

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 6:31 AM, Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> wrote:
Leo (2008-12-15 18:24 +0000) wrote:

> On 2008-12-14 21:37 +0000, Xah Lee wrote:
>> I really feel sorry emacs's user base is dying. The most important
>> thing i think is to get emacs to use modern terminologies and be
>> compatible with the minimum of standard modern UI.
>
> Users are not scared off by Emacs's UI. It is more important its
> functionality.

Are people being scared off in the first place? I mean more than
normally. :-)

I don't know but at least among Debian GNU/Linux users Emacs's
popularity doesn't seem to have decreased. Here's a Debian popularity
contest[1] graph that shows the popularity of packages emacs21,
emacs21-nox, emacs22, emacs22-nox and emacs22-gtk:

   http://preview.tinyurl.com/55stry [2]

The graph shows that Emacs22 started gaining popularity around mid-2007
(the release) and Emacs21 started losing it. Those summed together Emacs
is no less popular than before. The latest official Debian release (4.0
"Etch") includes Emacs21.

This popularity measurement category is called "vote". It means that
user has accessed (atime) the files in the package within 30 days. It
roughly means that the software is actually being used, not only
installed.


---------------
[1] http://popcon.debian.org/

[2] http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacs21%2Cemacs21-nox%2Cemacs22%2Cemacs22-gtk%2Cemacs22-nox&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1