Emacs User Survey 2020
The first Emacs User Survey, run by Adrien Brochard from 19 October to 30 November 2020, with
7,344 responses (7,240 through the web form, 103 by email). Results and the full response set are
published as CSV and a Jupyter notebook in the survey's own repository, which is why this page can
quote counts the published write-up never graphed: the numbers below were computed here from
Emacs-User-Survey-2020-clean.csv on 2026-08-14, not copied from a summary.
Tier T2, and the reason matters more than usual. This is a self-selected online survey advertised
through Emacs channels — Reddit, mailing lists, /r/emacs, EmacsConf. There is no sampling frame for
"Emacs users" and no way to weight the result, so every percentage here describes people who answered
an Emacs survey, a population certainly more engaged than the average user. It is the largest count
of its kind that exists, and it is not a probability sample. The 2022 edition drew about 6,500
responses, roughly 1,000 of them partial.
What it says about Org
One question — "Describe your org-mode usage" — is a closed multiple choice, so it tabulates cleanly. Out of 7,344 responses:
| Answer | n | share |
|---|---|---|
| daily | 3,521 | 47.9% |
| from time to time | 2,091 | 28.5% |
| I don't use org-mode | 1,492 | 20.3% |
| I use Emacs only for org-mode | 239 | 3.3% |
Four in five respondents use Org at all (79.7%); half use it daily or exclusively (51.2%). The two ends of that table are the interesting ones. 239 people run Emacs only to run Org — the package recruits users to its host program. And 1,492 do not touch it, so Org is not universal even among people engaged enough to fill in an Emacs survey.
A second question asked what respondents use Org for, as free text; 4,980 answered and 2,364 left it blank. Keyword matching over those answers (done here, overlapping and rough — one answer can hit several patterns) gives:
| Pattern | n | share of answers |
|---|---|---|
| notes, journal, wiki, zettel, roam | 3,068 | 61.6% |
| agenda, TODO, GTD, task, planning | 1,937 | 38.9% |
| export, LaTeX, publish, writing | 1,214 | 24.4% |
| Babel, literate, src block, notebook | 509 | 10.2% |
| tables, spreadsheet | 53 | 1.1% |
| email, contacts | 33 | 0.7% |
| clocking, time tracking | 25 | 0.5% |
The last four rows are small enough to read as noise in a free-text question nobody was prompted to answer completely. The 10.2% for Babel is not, and it sits awkwardly beside this corpus's own claim that Babel is Org's distinctive contribution — see org-mode-adoption.
Usage by how long someone has used Emacs
Cross-tabulating the Org question against "For how many years have you been using Emacs?" is the closest thing in the dataset to a diffusion reading, and it is not flat:
| Emacs tenure | n | uses Org at all | daily or only | never |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0–1 yr | 1,080 | 78.7% | 52.9% | 21.3% |
| 2–3 yr | 1,287 | 84.8% | 53.3% | 15.2% |
| 4–5 yr | 1,034 | 85.2% | 54.6% | 14.8% |
| 6–10 yr | 1,388 | 82.2% | 50.5% | 17.8% |
| 11–20 yr | 1,373 | 77.8% | 50.3% | 22.2% |
| 20+ yr | 1,123 | 68.4% | 46.4% | 31.6% |
Penetration peaks in the four-to-five-year band and falls away in both directions, hardest among the longest-tenured: a 20+ year Emacs user is more than twice as likely to have never used Org as a four-to-five-year user (31.6% against 14.8%).
One cross-section cannot say why. The buckets confound two different stories — how long a person has been exposed to Org, and which cohort they joined in — and the survey has no panel to separate them. What it does fix is the arithmetic: someone reporting 20+ years of Emacs in 2020 started by 2000, three years before Org existed. org-mode-adoption takes that apart.
Other results worth keeping
- Respondents were 96% male, per the organisers' EmacsConf 2022 talk on the survey series.
- Org ranked second among packages by mention, behind Magit, in both 2020 and 2022, with the gap narrowing in 2022.
- "Software development" alone (1,967) and "software development and writing" (1,391) are the two largest answers to what people use Emacs for; research writing appears in the next several combinations down.
Related
org-mode · org-mode-adoption · org-mode-literate-programming · carsten-dominik · adoption-curve-measurement · technology-adoption-curve