EMACS is the 20th popular IDE according to Stack Overflow Dev Survey 2022

1 Visual Studio Code 2 Visual Studio 3 IntelliJ 4 Notepad++ **5 Vim** ... 8 Sublime Text 9 Eclipse ... 11 Xcode **13 Nano** 16 Neovim 17 NetBeans ***20 Emacs***

I am curious about Nano. Who uses it and for what?

For IDE... I don't know what to say...

NetBeans before Emacs, the world is lost :'(

How the hell is nano's rank higher than emacs's rank

I guess that's just people who only code directly on a server through SSH and don't want to learn any quirky keybindings with vim/emacs.

Nano? I'm not sure what IDE stands for anymore...

I sometimes use nano on remote server, mainly for quick configuration of package manager and shell preferences. I never bother installing Emacs on server. Once I set up the server using nano. I use Emacs and tramp into the server for everything.

Moreover, I expect it's people who *occasionally* do something via ssh rather than in their regular editor; and on those odd occasions they use nano, because they don't know vi.

Interestingly, Emacs is #2 in "Top paying technologies" for the IDE category: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#top-paying-technologies-integrated-development-environment

good to know...

I think that’s the Clojure folks

Well, it's a heavily biased result for the following reasons: * Many Emacs users do not consider Emacs to be an "IDE" in nature. In fact, the word "IDE" has a negative connotation almost, as something heavyweight, slugish in comparison to Emacs' textual UI. * The question is about IDE. Many Emacs users do not configure their Emacs to behave like an IDE. Many prefer the more editor-like feel. While IDEs facilitate some features, which are more config to set up in Emacs, Emacs facilitates lots of features, which IDEs do not facilitate at all, because they are not text based. Try as they will, if they show dialogs with non-selectable text and are not fully and easily controllable via shortcuts like Emacs, they cannot offer this. * It is a survey on StackOverflow. Many Emacs users are probably not even registered there, because of ideological reasons and SO's reluctance to become more free software. I've asked SO myself about displaying a JS license and all that. Got an idiotic reply and that was the end of that. And even if Emacs users have an account on SO, it does not mean, that they will participate in that survey. It has been a long time, since I wrote a question or answer there. I've learned to read the documentation of things a bit more and often the question is already answered anyway. * Emacs users often organize in other communities like mailing lists, which are often a very helpful place of experts and often quite responsive. These days, I would rather first ask on mailing lists, than make a SO post, for some wannabe coming around marking it as duplicate, when there is clearly a difference and prematurely closing questions and all that toxic stuff.

Rather have emacs on #20 for 40 more years than have it in the top five and sink.

I am culprit of that xD

The world is full of examples demonstrating that popular rarely means the best.

Same. Top rank is a disease imo.

Compared to ed maybe. Integration of multiline display can be quite handy

Sorry I didn't answer the survey for i was too busy making superb commits in magit

Efficency

Once again StackOverflow survey has demonstrated - Emacs users don't give two shits about their damn surveys.

And some Ruby folks. [matz uses Emacs](https://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life).

> Many Emacs users do not consider Emacs to be an "IDE" in nature. Did you notice that the Nano editor is on the list and is in a higher rank than both Emacs and Neovim?

Exactly! Who the hell uses Nano as an IDE, and why are there more people using Nano as an IDE than both Emacs and Neovim?! My guess is that they ask people, "what do you use to write code?" and whatever people answer is listed as their "IDE." Nano doesn't even have LSP integration, how else could it even qualify as an IDE unless people were just blurting out whatever text editor they use in the CLI?

You underestimate how much corporate code is still running on Java. Java is like the COBOL of the 21st century, it will be running legacy systems for decades beyond their intended life span.

My guess is that they ask people, "what do you use to write code?" and whatever people answer is listed as their "IDE." This list is probably not reliable at all.

Oh I know but I wouldn't use Netbeans to write Java haha

CLion, Rider, Android Studio, and IntelliJ are all products of the JetBrains company, and all make it pretty high on the list, which isn't surprising. I am probably most surprised that Sublime Text is as high as it is, I personally have never met anyone who uses it, yet apparently there is a much larger community of Sublime users than Emacs users. The fact that Nano is higher than both Emacs and Neovim, and the fact that Notepad++ is higher than Vim and Eclipse, kind of shows that this list is just completely unreliable. This isn't a measure of IDEs, this is asking the question, "what do you use to write code?" which is a different question than "do you use an IDE, if so which one?" Nano doesn't even have LSP support, it doesn't meet the definition of an IDE, unless you are among the people who say "Linux is my IDE," but then why not say "Linux" instead of Nano. This data is not reliable.

My first supervisor used nano all day to code PHP. Almost everyone on my current team uses nano for ssh sessions.

Above WebStorm, even. Not sure how to interpret this. But maybe there's simply a certain fraction of humorous responses there. And `ed, the standard editor` wasn't among the options.

Sublime Text was pretty popular before VSCode stole its thunder. I think it was the first editor with the command palette?

Pretty much how it is for me. I use emacs/tramp if I can, nano if I can't, and I know enough vi to get it into and out of insert mode and write a file... so basically just like an inconvenient nano.

I feel like it's partially a meme.

I think there are a couple factors at play there. I'd suspect Emacs correlates pretty strongly with age, and therefore years of experience. Moreover, for people who have learned the ecosystem, Emacs is a great tool for notetaking, organization, planning, and such. So it's more useful to a manager or an executive than a pure IDE would be.

Yeah not many people without much dev experience in the emacs world I think.

I agree with you. It also seems to me there's some kind of pattern there: some of the IDE mentioned are really language specific, or at least optimized for a specific language, while Emacs is... well, anything you'd like it to be.

I saw the command palette in TextMate for the first time and that was before Sublime Text 2 came out. At that time, TextMate was still proprietary software. I was open-sourced years later, but its major downside was the lack of Unicode support. I think that's why people migrated to ST2, despite it being a nagware still. I was so happy however, that there was finally a capable, smooth, fast starting, low-memory footprint, cross-platform editor, which has even supported proportional fonts for coding, that I bought it immediately. I was coding a lot in bash, REBOL, CoffeeScript around 2010 and for those languages, proportional fonts helped a lot to fit more code onto my 10" ASUS Eee PC 1000HA Netbook and 12" iBook G4 ':) Since I code in Clojure primarily, I had to give up on the aesthetics of proportional fonts, because nooo fckn editor can render leading spaces with 1em with... it wouldn't be a perfect solution, like elastic tabstops (https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/) but might be good enough...

I guess, you can't fill out the survey from eww; that's why! ;)

The question was "Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply."

> Not sure how to interpret this. I would interpret this as bad survey questions. They probably asked "what do you use to write code?" and the answers were put under "What IDE do you use?" That or, people took the question "which IDE do you use" to mean "which editor do you use?" Better questions to ask would have been *"do you use an IDE, if so which one?"* with VSCode, Eclipse, Xcode, JetBrains, as options, and a write-in option, **followed by** *"Do you use a code editor, if so which one?"* with Sublime, Notepad++, Emacs, Vim, as options, and a write-in option. This probably would have received responses that actually made sense.

emacs mfs find out that their editor ranked #20302849 in popularity and be like "5 POSITIONS BETTER THAN PREVIOUS YEAR!! LESSS FUCKING GOOOO"

I don't even know 20 IDEs.

Yes, but why do they point on nano for their IDE - rather than their regular editor?

Actually, the only binding is a must in Emacs is`M-x`

Then again, I never met anyone who uses eMacs either :D

Take that, nano!

For an IDE, I’m not sure. I will occasionally use it for quick one off edits to config files though.

we are content with being #20302849th thank you very much.

I am not. Emacs should be more popular.

I think I answered that survey, and I had nano and joe as remote shell editor. Maybe they put those answers into the IDE category

What about vim on #5? I imagine it won't be sinking any time soon.

I actually consider Emacs the most IDE of all the IDEs. It's unmatched in its ability to create a truly integrated environment.

I tried to look for the question that these were answers to, but couldn't find it, so I was just guessing at how it had been phrased (I guessed that people picked all the things they used regularly). If they had to pick only one thing and picked nano, then my explanation is totally wrong.

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Evil-mode laughs doomnessly.

Oh... That makes total sense! When you look at the stats, the sum is far over 100%, which means your theory should be correct.

Idk, err, ide as in I don’t ever.

Popularity I not the same as quality

Nano?!

I am sure that Nano is on this list for that 2% of people who don't give a dang about the Stack Overflow survey, so they voted Nano, because "lol"

Maybe you'd [fit in here](https://github.com/emacs-ng/emacs-ng)

There's me!

At which step do you really *need* nano?

I agree, I can't see any other explanation. I should remember that people do these things. My sense of humor is very low atm edit. typo

I agree with that but oh well not everyone will like the same things as us :/

I sincerely don't give a shit about that. Popularity isn't a signal that an editor is good. The people who use the popular editor always switch around editors to go with the trend. Emacs (and Vim) users learn their editor and use that for the next 40 years because it will be around for the next 40 years

Most of the operations can be done without nano, but using nano seems to be a more braindead solution, e.g. editing .zshrc, pacman.conf. But there is one thing I NEED nano, EDITOR=nano visudo. I have yet to find something to replace this use case.

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Do you find it as easy to create editor macros or other kinds of automation in Sublime Text with Python as you would in Emacs with Lisp?

Popularity means everything for every open source project. For example, I really like neovim, but I think that kakoune has better keybindnings model, it's really an improvement over vim keybindings in my opinion. Still, I will never use kakoune, because its ecosystem is nowhere near close to ecosystem of neovim or emacs. Because they are miles more popular. And I agree with you that popularity doesn't mean quality, and that a lot of people are trend chasers. This is part of my wish -- that less people would be trend chasers and actually tried out different options like vim or emacs.