I'm saying that the bulk of the community that keeps it alive and growing are either not SW professionals, or are but their use of Emacs goes well beyond SW use. As such, even if they "switch" to a tool like VSCode, they'll still primarily use Emacs for most things (email, document authoring, TODOs, etc). And Emacs as a SW will continue to grow as a result.
A significant portion of the Emacs "influencers" are not SW developers (think Protesilaos). Quite a few very popular Emacs packages are made by non-SW folks.
Which, as I pointed out, is why most of the talks are not related to SW development. Because that's not why the power users use Emacs.
In my (large) company, the bulk of Emacs users I've met use it for SW development, and little else. As such, while they may be really good users for the SW development they do, they tend to be fairly ignorant about the rest of Emacs (not heard of org mode or magit, some even think XEmacs is the improved Emacs, etc). Globally, such folks may well be in the majority, and if the bulk of them stop using Emacs, no one would even notice.
In fact, as someone who's been using Emacs since before VSCode existed, I simply did not notice the (real) exodus to VSCode. If you follow only the Emacs ecosystem (Emacs reddit, blogs, social media), the online engagement has exploded in the last 15 years. You would never guess that Emacs may have lost users overall (if it did).
Of course, how can you not love it? All the tools you need for writing are at your fingertips. You can have a thesaurus, spellchecking, translation and search, dictionaries, etymology lookup, word counter, Flesch-Kincaid reading ease tester, ChatGPT, Anthropic and other models, dictation, formatter, converter, exporter and so much more. Why would anyone ever exposed to that power willingly part with it?
I suspect, that most of those users did not create such an elaborate setup, that has all those things. But perhaps, if there is a ready made config for all of it somewhere, maybe they are using that?
You don't really need an elaborate setup; it's sufficient to know how to install packages and explore some possibilities. It usually takes someone experienced to convince them that Emacs is truly the best choice for dealing with plain text. I'm not a musician, but I suppose if I was an aspiring and very talented guitar player and someone would convince me that Gibson Les Paul or Fender Statocaster is just the hands-down the best choice for the job - nothing would ever stop me from finding a way to have and use one, right?
And to leave you with a practical recommendation, not just philosophical rambling, here's https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio. Note that I haven't used it myself. I don't know anything about it, beyond its existence.
I guess I should clarify. I'm not surprised how much writers like it. I'm more surprised by how many non-programmers are enthusiastic about diving into elisp.
Right. I had the privilege and pleasure of watching and guiding people with and without a previous background in programming to learn a Lisp dialect. Some beginners, for various reasons, would pick Clojure or Emacs, or in one case, even both at the same time. Interestingly, they had no problem approaching new concepts. Meanwhile, programmers with previous experience in other programming languages sometimes struggled, became confused, and irritated. I think this makes sense - when you don't know any programming, you approach it without prejudice, there is nothing "weird" about things; you don't get confused about Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2, dynamic and lexical scope, naming, types, etc.; you have no reasons to dislike or hate things - when something works you get excited. And it's not too difficult to find some joy with Emacs these days - you only need to find a starter kit like Doom, open a scratch buffer write an expression and eval it. Once someone is guided through the initial steps, they'd write their first Lisp function or an expression, get to see it working - of course they get very enthusiastic.
You can simply 'M-x list-packages' and search for things.
- Thesaurus - there are a few different packages, powerthesaurus, le-thesaurus, etc. I use mw-thesaurus, at this point mainly out of habit, it's the first Emacs package I ever made and it served me so well, I never had reasons to look for alternatives.
- Spellchecking - I suppose flyspell still holds the majority, I prefer jinx.el, it completely replaced flyspell for me
- translation - also multiple choices, from translate-mode, org-translate, ob-translate, lingva, immersive-translate, etc. I use google-translate - for no particular good reason, it's just an old habit.
- search - consult-omni, it takes some initial tweaking, but then you can simultaneously search on Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, your browser history, etc., while typing the query once.
- dictionaries - sdcv
- etymology - define-it, wiktionary-bro
- word counter - is built-in; reading ease testing - writegood.el
- LLMs - multiple choices, gptel and chatgpt-shell are the most popular.
Would someone not very carefully reading your comment think otherwise? Yes, probably.