Re: How Many Emacs Users?

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> At a time where the average Emacs user compiled and installed his
> Emacs by hand, the mailing list numbers might have still had some
> relation to the actual user numbers.

Back then the average Emacs user was student at a university, where
the sysadmin compiled and installed Emacs on the big, central shared
computer.  Or if they were progressive, on the big, central shared NFS
server.

Your other estimate was better, judging by various pools, among those
Unix users who care what OS they are running, that is today mostly
GNU/Linux enthusiasts, I guess it is 50% vi(m) users, and 40% Emacs
users, and 11% other[1].  

What is hard is to estimate how large a fraction the non-enthusiast
fraction of the GNU users constitute these days.  The people who use a
GNU/Linux + StarOffice + Mozilla setup because of the freedom or price
benefits over a Microsoft or Apple box with similar tools, but don't
really care about the Unix personality.  These are unlikely to
participate in pools.  And I suspect they constitute most of the
growth in the GNU desktop market share.

Anyway, I take a shoot and say half the users are currently in that
silent "other" category, which give an estimate of one million Emacs
users. The real number is probably within one or two orders of
magnitude of that.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Numbers may not add up to 100% because of rounding, despite being
made up for the occasion.