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I saw someone on Twitter posing the question:

"How many people around the world use GNU #Emacs? Could it be over a million?"

It struck me as a very interesting question and got me thinking about how large the community actually is! I came up with two data points:

Based on the 2016 Stack Overflow Survey, 5.2% of 46,613 responses (of 56,033 respondents) used Emacs as a development environment. Stack Overflow indicate that they estimated 46 million people visited SO in January alone. If the survey respondents were representative of visitors, that would suggest ~2.0 million users of this sort visited SO in January 2016 (or at least 2,425 users ;-).

In 2015 they asked about preferred text editor. 4.1% of 16,778 resonses (of 26,086 respondents) indicated Emacs or XEmacs. At the time they estimated 32 million people visited SO monthly. These numbers suggest that ~840 thousand users of this sort were visiting SO in February 2015.

They acknowledge both surveys are:

...biased against devs who don't speak English, or who don't like taking English-language surveys.

(and they likely offer a high estimate for their amount of unique traffic)

What other data might shed some light on this question? Maybe the Debian package popularity contest?

Tyler
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ebpa
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    I think there are only 42 unique users - that looks like the right answer. But many aliases. – Drew Apr 15 '17 at 03:54
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    I have my doubts all visitors would have filled in that survey, I surely didn't. Whether the group that does is representative of the whole stackoverflow community, I don't know. Another point to keep in mind is that many of those questions allowed naming more than one editor, so it could have included people using Emacs along with something else, like for Org only. – wasamasa Apr 15 '17 at 08:04
  • [Xah Lee](http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/text_editor_trends.html) did ask the same question a while back. He used [Google Trends](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=emacs,xcode,notepad). As you can see Emacs is still unpopular. I think Google Trends gives a better idea than some SF survey, yet it won't return a number of users. I don't think thats measurable at all. – Henrik Pingel Apr 18 '17 at 17:35
  • It appears that interest in emacs is declining. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs – daveloyall Mar 15 '18 at 17:53
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    Re the google trends, the queries are likely highest for new users on the curve. Not as many new users doesn't necessarily mean the old users have died. – Craig Hicks Aug 04 '18 at 08:47
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    Many users don't need a search engine(like Google) to answer their questions about Emacs :) Also there are more search terms related to Emacs like org mode and other packages which don't add up to Emacs itself. – Compro Prasad Oct 23 '18 at 04:17
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    Also Take a note that 'the decline' is because some people migrated to DuckDuckGo. – azzamsa Feb 09 '19 at 11:04
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    There are millions of course who use it but granted, there are many more developers/programmers who use something else and some who have never even heard of Emacs (mostly the young ones). – francogrex Nov 23 '19 at 10:29
  • I'm a Google Cloud Platform user, and do gladly respond to their surveys. In one of them there was a question about the IDE I was using, and (warning: Capslock on) EMACS WAS NOT EVEN AN CHECKBOX!!!111! (Capslock off). I was nearly offended. – kkm inactive - support strike Feb 18 '20 at 06:24
  • @azzamsa: do you have any quantitative sources? I am genuinely interested (not contesting your statement at all, since it's factually true: *some* did, at least one, namely Stephen Wolfram). To correct for the trend, a reliable statistic is essential. – kkm inactive - support strike Feb 18 '20 at 06:30
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    A recent [survey of Emacs users][1] was completed by 7300 respondents. Most surveys have a yield of about 5%, which would suggest 146,000 users, assuming that all users were reached by the communication (which will not be the case). [1]: https://emacssurvey.org/ – Peter Prevos Feb 01 '21 at 09:31
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    @PeterPrevos, I think it'd make sense to post it as an answer. (Such a popular question deserves at least one, even imprecise answer IMO.) Maybe noting that [/r/emacs](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/) has 54.6k members now would make sense too, to at least have *some* estimate. – Y. E. Sep 14 '21 at 06:38

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This is a very interesting question, and I doubt that there is a way to get a solid single number. But since this question is asking what possible data points can be used, I feel that bringing up ELPA and MELPA is useful.

I think it is accurate to say that at some point in their career with Emacs, a user is going to download a tool that is hosted on ELPA or MELPA. So if it is possible to gather numbers regarding users from those repositories, that could serve as a way to get data.

I have not been able to find a way to gather user numbers from ELPA. However, MELPA seems to list the number of downloads next to the packages that it lists. If we sort by number of DLs per package, we can see that the dash package has 4,264,755 DLs at time of writing. The next most popular package is magit at 3,452,140 DLs. MELPA claims that 291,308,600 package downloads to date have occurred.

Obviously these numbers have problems:

  • I don't know what time period these DLs for specific packages represent. I believe they are lifetime DLs because the total downloads says it is to-date. However, I do not know if that claim extends to the individual packages.
  • While these popular packages are well used in the emacs community, we cannot guarantee all users of emacs have used these packages. Nevertheless, it should be noted that dash is a dependency of many other packages which can be seen on the package summary. So an emacs user does not need to intentionally download dash to be listed as a DL, and would be listed if they were using other popular packages, such as flycheck, magit, org-super-agenda, or treemacs.
  • We cannot use these numbers to account for people who have never interacted with a repo.
  • These DLs do not represent individual users. At the very least, I know I use emacs on multiple computers and have downloaded magit for both of them.
  • We have no idea how many of these DLs are active emacs users. Only that the package had been downloaded that many times.
  • The numbers of DLs on each individual package should not be viewed in isolation. Taking the two packages mentioned above should not be read to imply that there are 7.7 million unique users of those packages because that is the sum of DLs currently -- These figures include users downloading multiple packages.

I think it could be a viable project for a savvy user to view the rate of increase for the DLs and use that rate to estimate active or new users. If someone were to do such a project, their findings could offer a unique perspective to this question.

Malle Yeno
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