It seems that if vim is so much more popular than emacs, old fashionedness doesn't necessarily make an editor less popular.
If one believes that emacs would be more popular if it were more like some other editor that is more popular then being more like vim would make emacs more popular. Evil has existed for a long time but vim is still more popular. As much as emacs can be like vim, people still feel vim is better at being vim.
If emacs was more like VS code, would people want to use it for that reason? It seems like VS Code would always be better at being like VS Code than emacs.
Emacs has a loyal following, conceivably of millions of users? It also attracts new users who like things about it. There are packages for most languages, even very obscure ones. Being less popular than vim doesn't seem to make emacs less useful or keep new people from picking it up. It seems like emacs is a good thing according to many people as is and if its developers want to make users happy, looking at what people use emacs for and making it do that better would probably be a good idea. Making it more like other things that already exist doesn't make as much sense to me really.
I guess I don't really understand why it is important to be most popular as long as something is useful with a strong user and developer base.
Agreed. Emacs and Vim basically try to do the same thing with two very different approaches, and both can fit well depending on the use-case. I also get why many prefer VS Code, because spending hours to learn and configure a program just for text editing is not universally appealing. But other people just want that configurability.
> Evil has existed for a long time but vim is still more popular.
Because the behaviour isn't identical(it even has default settings that intentionally deviate!), because it isn't complete(it doesn't affect any other mode), but most importantly for me because Emacs cannot fully match Vim's keybinding functionality. I broke my Emacs configuration a dozen times before realising that.
I am glad I tried out Emacs as a Vim user though, it led to a couple improvements of my Vim configuration and I learned a couple new things.
If one believes that emacs would be more popular if it were more like some other editor that is more popular then being more like vim would make emacs more popular. Evil has existed for a long time but vim is still more popular. As much as emacs can be like vim, people still feel vim is better at being vim.
If emacs was more like VS code, would people want to use it for that reason? It seems like VS Code would always be better at being like VS Code than emacs.
Emacs has a loyal following, conceivably of millions of users? It also attracts new users who like things about it. There are packages for most languages, even very obscure ones. Being less popular than vim doesn't seem to make emacs less useful or keep new people from picking it up. It seems like emacs is a good thing according to many people as is and if its developers want to make users happy, looking at what people use emacs for and making it do that better would probably be a good idea. Making it more like other things that already exist doesn't make as much sense to me really.
I guess I don't really understand why it is important to be most popular as long as something is useful with a strong user and developer base.