Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Perry Smith <pedzsan@gmail.com>]

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On Aug 26, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide
> 
>  Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has lost some
> 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has lost more,
> dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).
> 
>  Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?
> 
>  I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user (not
> counting people I only talked to via the Internet).  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).  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?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++,
> Python, Javascript and Java, and general text editor.
> 
>  Thank you for your attention.  Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

I've used GNU emacs since it was first released.  From my own personal perspective,
there was a time -- seems like version 18? where it got stuck for a very long time.

Version 22 came out it appears in 2007, 23 came out in 2009.  Now 24 came out
in 2012.  To me, the pace of change has picked up substantially relative to 1995
to 2000 -- but I'm just basing that off of my gut feel recollections.

giggle... I just noticed that Google's trend starts in 2005... thats really funny.  
I guess that is a "trend".  But Emacs isn't trendy.

Emacs is old school.  Very old school with the ability to drive real tty's over
300 baud modems with spectacular  efficiency.  Its on X11, windows, and Mac.
Folks have added emacs key mappings inside browsers and countless other
tools.  Indeed... I bet Eclipse had an emacs key binding option in it.

If you use emacs, you love it.  If you don't, you hate it.  That may explain the 
lack of searches.  Those who know it, already know it. And those who don't 
are not looking for it.

I just don't see it dying off.  Things like TextMate come and will probably fade
away long before emacs dies.

And... its 100% open source and free.  Emacs is the original open source GNU
release that Richard developed and deployed and eventually became the
genesis  of FSF.  You are *almost* asking will FSF be around forever -- which is
also *almost* like asking if Linux will be around forever.  I'm thinkings its a
pretty safe bet that it will be around my entire lifetime and probably yours as well.

Perry


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