Are you ever afraid that org mode or Emacs may be abandoned by most of the users? How will you eventually migrate? I have no idea :)

Um, no? Literally *everyone* else in the world could quit using Emacs, and it wouldn't make any difference to me. I spend a fair bit of time in QuickEmacs, which pretty much no one uses, and it's *fine*. Also, the reason I use Emacs is because a good macro editor is superior for what I need than any other editor paradigm. So long as there are people willing to invest in learning proper tools, and so long as the work I do is something for which people can get paid, there *will* be people using emacs and org mode to do it. (Strictly, **GNU** emacs might get replaced by some other emacs implementation, but I don't care *which* emacs I run).

As long as you have the source code, you can compile and run Emacs forever. But let's separate the 2 things: if development of orgmode stops, it will hardly affect you because everything will still work. Everything is just plain text. If you'll move to something else you will still have searchable plain text files with your information. You can convert everything to markdown which is quite popular these days, either using orgmode or pandoc. If Emacs stops being developed, still you can use it for many years. You may just switch to another editor, and there are many alternatives. But if Emacs does provide something special, then there's little chance it will be really abandoned. So again, what kind of migration are you talking about? orgmode markup to something else? elisp environment, emacs as a general editor?

That's one of the appealing aspects of emacs and in general other Free and Open-Source software but especially programs like emacs. It literally doesn't matter if all the devs, the community, etc. all disappeared one day and you were the only emacs user left. Because emacs would continue to work, you can still change it however you wish - which is ofc made easier by the fact that emacs sort of explicitly encourages you to hack on it, change it, extend it, etc. and makes it pretty easy. Regarding Org-Mode, it is a plaintext format so you can view org-mode in any other editor and if you're willing to, you could either develop scripts or a plugin for another editor or use one of the ones already made to replicate some features you use in emacs. There are several org-mode plugins including one for neovim, vscode, etc. Now I don't know how good they are but I'd imagine they're good enough for the basics atleast. But despite all of that, you can just export your org-mode files to markdown or whatever format you would want to switch to if you ever decide to stop using org-mode. Not really any lock-in

I always evaluate risks (sysadmin), in that case since Emacs is one of the oldest software still actively developed *by a real community* spread around the world is one of the least dangerous to disappear. The most dangerous tools are proprietary software, since their "source" use them to make money, not to supply a tool, and things can change quickly for non-technical reasons. Company-backed FLOSS projects are still dangerous, especially if rooted on giant tools (say Electron, to name one), FLOSS projects with a very small community follow, young projects follow. I honestly fear far more new iron changes that makes harder and harder to use FLOSS on it, iron crappiness in general, kind of iron availability (like no more desktops, a world based on tablets and VR crap (not likely, not possible today, but...). However in risk terms there is a risk since no other solution exists to migrate to. I can try SmallTalk environments like Pharo, but while they are still actively developed they are meant just to be development environments not generic tools like old Xerox workstations so their are not much an alternative. Classic UNIX have almost equal chance of being abandoned as Emacs, and while it's the least alien option there is no real drop-in replacement. I was a hardcore vimmer, I'm still better in zsh scripting than elisp, I still have zsh and countless scripts on daily use, but it's not as productive as Emacs. The most important threat IMO is the GUI part: these days GUIs libraries are in a really messy and semi-abandoned state, big&powerful try pushing webui for anything and most of new development goes in that direction, something hard for Emacs to adapt and a terminal-based Emacs it's there, of course, but it's not as powerful as the GUI one. Probably OpenGL would be the safest harbor (low level, used by CAD/CAE tools, they need to continue existing for many years) but they tend to be very complicated for desktop usage and their FLOSS state is definitively not much good...

> Are you ever afraid that org mode or Emacs may be abandoned by most of the users? No. > How will you eventually migrate? I won't. Emacs and the set of stuff I use could stay exactly like they are for years and I'd just keep using them.

By all measures, it’s already been abandoned by most users (they are on more popular text editors). Yet, Emacs remains strong amongst its relatively niche users.

I usually worry more about things I know will happen, like death.

> It literally doesn't matter if all the devs, the community, etc. all disappeared one day Good luck using emacs without a development community improving it!

I mean that you would still be able to use emacs in the current state you have installed it on your computer. It's of course ideal if there's a community using it and developers working on it but my point is that you are still able to use emacs and make changes yourself if needed even if for some reason in a really weird worst case scenario every emacs user just disappeared

I don't think there is realistically any chance of this happening. Its a FOSS project with a really passionate community. Its not the most popular editor, but it provides a niche no other piece of software has, so I don't think people will stop using it. After all its been 40 years, why won't it last another 40? And even if it did, all my stuff is plain text, I just convert it to latex or markdown and use that. My files are not locked away by a proprietary format, so I have no risk of losing them anytime soon

No.

Uh, if you felt that Emacs wasn't useful without hypothetical future improvements, you wouldn't be using it *now* (or ever). The only crucial thing is that it can be compiled, so if *no one* undertook to ensure that it could still be compiled on future systems then over time it would become unusable for more users. But then if that happened and I couldn't fix it myself, I'd do what I used to do back in the days when I was forced to use a Windows machine at work, which is to do all of my work inside a VM which ran an environment that was good for using Emacs.

The amount of time I have invested into it, this is a frightening prospect, but as with others I'm not concerned about this. David Wilson gave a very compelling talk on why he doesn't consider this to be a risk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ahR5K_wkNQ Worth watching, as with all his content.

> if you felt that Emacs wasn't useful without hypothetical future improvements, you wouldn't be using it now (or ever). Yes, that's what I was getting at. > so if no one undertook to ensure that it could still be compiled on future systems then over time it would become unusable for more users. Again, yes, that's my point. > But then if that happened and I couldn't fix it myself, I've been building software for decades, and contributed to open source software. I've done package maintenance on systems. The idea that any individual /user/ of a package can do anything more than the most basic of maintenance is ridiculous. Is my only point. Sure, if you want to become an emacs maintainer, you can maintain emacs ... but that's sort of tautological.

Man, I have very high doubts about the fact you've been building software for decades. I think you missed the point.

Any reason you're using quick Emacs instead of regular Emacs?

2022 ... 1999, and I invoked a compiler for the first time closer to 1992. What's the point that I missed, then?

This is something I never understood. I tell people the same thing, and they're incredulous, but I never claimed what I wrote was any good.

It's *quick* :-P You can build it as a static binary, and it can be compiled by tinycc without needing access to GNU Make. This means it can be used on embedded systems (routers and the like), and severely resource contstrained systems. I use it heavily on my jailbroken kindle keyboard 3. Essentially, it is to GNU Emacs what `busybox vi` is to `vim`: No where near as nice or as powerful, but can run pretty much anywhere.

Unless those users break into my house and take my hard drive with them when they abandon Emacs, I couldn’t care less what they do. My setup works, reliably, across as many operating systems as I need it to, without being beholden to a particular company or ecosystem. Whether or not people will use Emacs in the future (spoiler alert: they will) is entirely orthogonal to my use of it.

It's all plain text. Everything, So long as there are tools for converting plain text you can import it into any format you can imagine. With plain text there is no lock-in. UTF8 and even ASCII are not going anywhere. Twenty years ago (well perhaps a little more) I was still struggling with people who would send me doc files that could not be opened with doc. If you created an English language document in Japanese Word, you couldn't open it in the version of Word sold in the States. If you were using an old version of Word you couldn't open files created on the latest version of Word. **That** is a lock-in problem. You will never have that kind of problem with anything created or saved in Emacs.

You use *emacs* on a *kindle keyboard 3* O.o

Obviously. What else would you do with it?

Yeah, absolutely. Any tool can die, but it is much easier to migrate away from Emacs than from something like OneNote.

In my case migration was easy: I started in mid-December and by mid-January I was quite comfortable in neovim. Feature-wise I really miss neogit, since there's no good enough port. Otherwise I'd say I ended up with a much smoother and faster editor and a way smaller config file. I wasn't a heavy org-mode user, though.

Seeing no competitor has been able to improve the concept in 40-50 years, I highly doubt Emacs is going away anytime soon.

There are people still using WordStar on DOS. Emacs as a tool will continue working as long you have a host for it, and if those operating systems stop supporting it, you still have the option to use an old system with it, likely an FOSS operating system.

Literally zero concern with this. I will maintain it if it comes to that.

Not op. > The idea that any individual /user/ of a package can do anything more than the most basic of maintenance is ridiculous. I bet it was this part. I know that I hack on, fix and maintain obscure software for fun in my spare time, I do not think that this is beyond the average programmer, adding features takes skill but isn't impossible. .

Are you using Org mode and Emacs because other people use it, or because it is useful to you?

The right answer is : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect „The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy.“ Nice example is a spoon, spoons are not going anywhere …

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**[Lindy effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)** >The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy. Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence or competition and greater odds of continued existence into the future. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/emacs/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)

Sure, but at some point, one needs to transition into being an emacs developer to, well, develop emacs. I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted here, tbh. :/ I'm merely trying to say: stop devaluing open-source software developer / maintainer labor. Developing software is /hard/, and it takes time and specialized knowledge and skill. Software degrades over time; it needs upkeep. This idea that people can do hobbyist-level upkeep of critical infrastructure is /bad/, actually.

> hobbyist-level upkeep How is that different than the status quo? The most knowledgeable dev among emacs-devel is a linguistics teacher. Granted he probably spends as much if not more time tweaking emacs than he does publishing papers. Edit: And apparently there's this other ass clown who seems to be spending an inordinate time on a commercial fork. I dunno if he's a pro programmer, but his code is definitely hobbyist-level.

Because the OP posed a situation where those people don't exist, and they'll just … do it themselves, somehow. > It literally doesn't matter if all the devs, the community, etc. all disappeared one day and you were the only emacs user left. Because emacs would continue to work, you can still change it however you wish - which is ofc made easier by the fact that emacs sort of explicitly encourages you to hack on it, change it, extend it, etc. and makes it pretty easy. This argument for open-source is /rubbish/. Note that it's not "someone can take their place" or "it's open to anyone of any background to become a developer" or all sorts of reasonable arguments. It's "any user will be able to 'change it however [they] wish'". This is not quite how software works. There are practical limits to what untrained parties can do … until such time as they become trained parties, thus invalidating the original condition.

>How is that different than the status quo? The most knowledgeable dev among emacs-devel is a linguistics teacher. you're the only one making any association on people's profession in real life to their skills in developing Emacs. What they seem to mean is, if the people who actually develop/developed emacs disappeared, you will have something similar to a labor shortage in that there will be no person skillful in Emacs development to develop it. The good part of Emacs, is that it seems documented enough to make this task "easier", but it is complex software regardless. Most users don't have the knowledge to start developing Emacs overnight.

I used notgnu emacs for five years for daily development (C). While very limited in capability in comparison with standard emacs, it worked for me. I never met anyone else who used it online, and I think that may have included the author (Julie Melbin) for the most part. Never found a bug, never lost a byte.

Emacs is currently experiencing a increase in users and contributors, however it occupies a fairly unique niche in that it is really designed to be operated by and empower single users. Some people call this the lisp curse, but they miss the fact that it actually makes the whole system far more robust because an individual using Emacs can survive and even thrive without also preventing them from collaborating when they want. In other ecosystems users are dependent on some external corporations or large groups to get stuff done due to the complexity of the system and they are actively disempowered and are at much greater risk for extinction. Emacs is the antithesis of this. In a thousand years someone could rediscover Emacs version 28 and if they could get it to run they might not have the various elpas but they would have everything else.