Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:

> Since 2004 Eclipse (Emacs' primary competiton for my use case)

If you are a programmer, Eclipse is *not* Emacs' primary
competitor (by a longshot). It is *vim*. vim and Emacs are
probably just about equally good for programming, but Emacs is
better for every other writing you do: for example, I write this
very text in Emacs, and I wouldn't want to do that in vim. vim is
a tool to write code - Emacs is that, and everything else. vim is
in line with the Unix philosophy of software (one tool - one task
- a common interface - add complexity by *combining* tools - the
pipes, redirects, etc.) while Emacs is perhaps the most advanced
human-computer interface.

> has lost some 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But
> Emacs has lost more, dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).

Eclipse is torture, and those digits from Google don't say
anything.

> Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

No, they are moronic. Trust me.

> I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs
> user (not counting people I only talked to via the Internet).

All programmers use Emacs or vim. Assange uses Emacs, and he has
been hunted into virtual house arrest by the CIA. Serious, what's
the hesitation? Why don't you just start Emacs and see if you like
it? Again, but this time without me losing my head, why do you
care so much what other people use? A lot of people are morons,
and those don't use Emacs. But some people are very good, and they
use Emacs or vim. What group do you want to be in?

> Of course, popularity is far from the only criteria, I don't
> have to obey fashion (if I did, I wouldn't be using GNU/Linux).

That's right you don't. So my advice: don't do it, at all.

> But I do want my development environment to be reasonably
> active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust
> Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?

100%

> At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> Java, and general text editor.

Yes, but probably you should not spend so much time with Python,
and drop Javascript and Java altogether, and replace C++ with C :)
But as for LaTeX, I love it and Emacs is great for doing it. Check
out [1] if you are into LaTeX - and yes, I did all that in Emacs.

> Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

Your English is very good. Emacs can do spellchecking with aspell,
but I didn't see a single mistake so perhaps you don't need it.

[1]

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/latex/matte.tex
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/about/matte.pdf

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573