> ...the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.

> What are you basing it on? ... it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com

A couple of things about this. For myself and many others, the reason I started vi in the first place is it's been installed by default on many kinds of machines. On SCO Unix and AIX from my youth, for example, this was the editor you used on a vanilla install of a machine to get things going. So this is part of why the install base is larger.

Another part of why the emacs community is more active is that Vi is just an editor, while emacs is more of a programming language and I daresay nearly an operating system in its own right. Because of the amazing power and flexibility of emacs there's a lot more stuff to discuss for Emacs than Vi.

When I was teaching myself to program, I had a night job in a warehouse. It so happened that the inventory software was on a UNIX server, and we accessed it through a terminal emulator from our windows computer. I discovered one day that I could exit the inventory software and end up with a shell prompt, and that the server had Perl available.

My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.

Stack Overflow survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...) has Vim at ~25% while Emacs is at 4.5%.

it also has notepad++ at 30.5% - I've seen one or two people who would use notepad++ when nothing else is available, but I don't think many people have it as their primary IDE.

Also, if you sum up all the JetBrains products (which you can get as IntelliJ Ultimate if you shell out the money), you land in the vicinity of 63% (not vim-related but a neat fact)

Emacs is more complex, and Emacs users do more in Emacs than just edit text. (think org-mode, debugger frontends, mail readers, etc.)

Well vi or vim is nearly always installed by default everywhere, but emacs rare is so.

Vi users RTFM.