Emacs User Survey – 2022 Results

For those who don&#x27;t really know what Emacs is (besides being an editor), I found this overview video from Steve Yegge as excellent. I never used Emacs, so it was very informing for me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lkIicfzPBys">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lkIicfzPBys</a><p>One particular aspect that intrigued me: you can extend VS Code (and similiar), but it&#x27;s a lot of work and boilerplate to create a plugin whose actual functionality is 3 lines of code (let&#x27;s say toLowercase()). In emacs, you can just write those 3 lines of code and that&#x27;s it, that&#x27;s your plugin.

He he; all I see is a very cute bad gateway pic.

Good steps are taken for Emacs 29: use-package, eglot, tree-sitter are coming to core!

The fact that about 10% maintains an elisp package, and that about 90% can program in elisp, makes me suspect the outcomes are skewed. Either that, or emacs is doomed.

I wonder what conclusion people want to draw from such a &quot;survey&quot;. Whom does it represent? Only people who happen to know about the survey and felt motivated enough to work through it. I would therefore guess that it was highly networked Emacs power users and avid consumers of tech news who participated. -- It&#x27;s hard to escape the echo chamber.

Offtopic: Why did Spacemacs development stop? They didn&#x27;t have a stable release from 2018.

Those are raw results, not edited for presentation. For example &quot;favourite packages&quot; just gives answers as is rather considering that input was comma-separated list. Interestingly a significant majority of surveyees are from HN and r&#x2F;emacs. And for anyone seeing the &quot;Vector{String}&quot; and wonders, yes, the framework utilized for the survey is written in Julia.