Use or say they use? vi and emacs are alot like some programming books people say they have read to show they are a programmer because they think that it what it means. My guess, < 10% with all the IDEs and text editors out there today. On servers or VMs they are common, in actually coding, probably overstated.

My laptop's top left corner of keyboard recently stopped working (new one shipped), and well, I've only then realized how much I use vim. I don't use it for programming, but well, it's the text editor I use the most for config files. I had to install a virtual keyboard (onboard) just to be able to press esc. So, while no esc isn't be a reason to not buy the new mbp for me (price, lack of magsafe and the dongle madness are the reasons I don't buy, though), it is still be very, very annoying.

Admit I use nano whenever editing through ssh, fake escape key was still the first thought through my mind when I saw that though. They at least have a little braille bump where escape is supposed to be? (if not new accessory opportunity? can i get a design patent on that?)

intellij has a vi mode that doesn't suck

Mac users are poseurs, got it.

Quite a lot. If you are doing anything on remote servers it's likely to be the only text editor. But I guarantee you that 99.999% of them only know (and need to know) the basics e.g. saving file, search, find/replace etc.

I would say maybe 1% of developers actually use them as an IDE given how poor they are compared to something like IntelliJ or Visual Studio.

1% is WWWAAAYYY too low. The stack overflow survey in a sibling comment had 30%. Some of us don't love all the baggage that comes with a full IDE.

I would bet that it's really in the single digit range. I think lots of programmers dishonestly claim to use it because its some sort of badge of honor to say you do.

Is more from old habits than a badge of honor. Fewer new developers use emacs or vi for coding. But I think "single digits" is too low too. I've been to talks by Microsoft engineers where they code using vi or emacs. One of the reasons is that the IDEs are always a step behind the languages.

> One of the reasons is that the IDEs are always a step behind the languages.

Depends on the language, some of them are IDE friendly, e.g. Java, C#, Eiffel, VB, Delphi, C++ Builder,

A lot of developers who use IDEs Ike Visual Studio also use VI style bindings with modal development styles within those IDEs.

When Visual Studio Code came out, the VIM extension was one of the most sought after.

I see vim or emacs used in just about every programmer meetup or dev on-site I visit. Every single one. And the numbers are much, much higher than 1%.

If you get used to editing vim or the extreme ease of laying out windows on the fly, jumping between window configurations and saving UIs in emacs, then even IntelliJ seems quite old-fashioned. I've tried 3 times to switch to CLion by JetBrains and every time I immediately miss all the ways emacs has streamlined my development life. (I use emacs with vim-emulation)

Vim keyboard macros (supported in emacs), the use of the "." key for all kinds of editing magic, and other things are extreme improvements over old-school editing that most "modern" editors use. The makers of VS Studio seem to think that a better autocompletion is going to improve the lives of developers, and other similar cockpit-like features. It's just basic text editing prowess that actually improves their lives, and that is where vim and emacs shine.

I'm not a hater, but emacs with vim-emulation. I've now seen everything :D

Evil mode is its name, and it is very popular. Best of both worlds.

Something around 30℅ https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tec...