Re: How Many Emacs Users?

[Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net>]

Pascal Bourguignon <spam@thalassa.informatimago.com> writes:

> Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:
>> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Brad Collins <brad@studiojungle.net> writes:
>> >
>> >> I'm writing a investment proposal and it would be helpful to
>> >> include the number of Emacs users (Xemacs etc) are out there.
>> >> 
>> >> Are we talking in the tens, hundreds, a million or more?
>> 
>> How would there be any way to know, unless GNU or FSF keep download
>> statistics?  And even that woul dnot be reliable, given that there
>> are many precompiled binary distributions that GNU/FSF now nothing
>> about.  There's no sales receipts for Emacs...
>
> About half the unix users, I'd say.  The other half (minus some
> epsilon) would be vi users.  Well, remove MacOSX users from the unix
> user count...

Not all (Emacs 21.3.50.1 on powerpc-apple-darwin 7.2.0 a.k.a. OS X
10.3.2).  OS X comes with Emacs as part of the standard distribution,
not that most OS X users have even the slightest awareness of that
fact.

> Between 2 and 4 million I'd say.

That's pretty cool.