For comparison of numbers and growth rate: VS Code was new in April 2015, had a claimed 2.6 Million active monthly users in Nov 2017[1], became the most popular editor in StackOverflow's user survey in 2018[2] with 34% of respondants and again in 2019 with 50% of respondants, to a claimed 11 million users in 2020[3]. Its codebase has been forked 16,000 times[4].
In 5 years, VS Code has gained more users than the population of Switzerland, than the population of London, than Uber has drivers. I'm not suggesting Emacs ought to chase maximum popularity, but if there was any feeling that "the editor / IDE market was saturated" or "there was no demand for editors", that doesn't seem accurate.
For comparison of numbers and growth rate: VS Code was new in April 2015, had a claimed 2.6 Million active monthly users in Nov 2017[1], became the most popular editor in StackOverflow's user survey in 2018[2] with 34% of respondants and again in 2019 with 50% of respondants, to a claimed 11 million users in 2020[3]. Its codebase has been forked 16,000 times[4].
In 5 years, VS Code has gained more users than the population of Switzerland, than the population of London, than Uber has drivers. I'm not suggesting Emacs ought to chase maximum popularity, but if there was any feeling that "the editor / IDE market was saturated" or "there was no demand for editors", that doesn't seem accurate.
[1] https://vscode-eastus.azurewebsites.net/blogs/2017/11/16/con... - (VS Code has telemetry built in, so Microsoft has some accurate idea of numbers, even if they still have the incentive to hype them up a bit).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code#Reception
[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2020/06/09/go-extension
[4] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode