I think you're right, but in the wrong direction. I'd imagine it's closer to a million.
- It has 3.6 million weekly NPM downloads.
- 110k GH stars.
- It's 5th (and its fork is 6th and a dependent is 8th) in monthly Openrouter tokens. Add them all together and they get close to Claude Code numbers.
There are maybe 30-60 million software developers and software developer adjacent people on this planet. Out of those probably 30% are late AI adopters, laggards, that haven't even used a terminal client and some don't even use AI.
Also a lot of people - developers included, just don't like command line tools.
Then pi is a secondary harness after Claude, Codex, OpenCode. I imagine the likelihood of pi having more than a few hundreds of thousands of users is remote. It's basically the Emacs or Vim of harnesses.
No, I definitely do not think millions of people use Emacs or Vim regularly. Vim is used more as it's available for quick config file editing on Linux.
I've been working for 20 years and I've met exactly 1 person daily driving Emacs (at least for a while), probably 10 people daily driving Vim and maybe low hundreds side arming Vim (maybe 5 for Emacs). And I've met or worked with low thousands of people at this point.
If I had to guess, probably 100 000 Vim daily drivers and maybe 20 000 Emacs daily drivers, both for extended periods of time. Dabblers probably 2-3x that at any time.
You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.
As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.
I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.
But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim.
Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.
True, but I think even OpenClaw usage has falled off a cliff, plus that makes it implicit usage, most OpenClaw users probably don't care either way, it was chosen for them and they probably don't think much about it.
distantsounds · · focus · HN ↗
randomperson321 · · focus · HN ↗
concrete_head · · focus · HN ↗
Wheen · · focus · HN ↗
- It has 3.6 million weekly NPM downloads.
- 110k GH stars.
- It's 5th (and its fork is 6th and a dependent is 8th) in monthly Openrouter tokens. Add them all together and they get close to Claude Code numbers.
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
There are maybe 30-60 million software developers and software developer adjacent people on this planet. Out of those probably 30% are late AI adopters, laggards, that haven't even used a terminal client and some don't even use AI.
Also a lot of people - developers included, just don't like command line tools.
Then pi is a secondary harness after Claude, Codex, OpenCode. I imagine the likelihood of pi having more than a few hundreds of thousands of users is remote. It's basically the Emacs or Vim of harnesses.
razster · · focus · HN ↗
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
aitchnyu · · focus · HN ↗
pessimizer · · focus · HN ↗
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
I've been working for 20 years and I've met exactly 1 person daily driving Emacs (at least for a while), probably 10 people daily driving Vim and maybe low hundreds side arming Vim (maybe 5 for Emacs). And I've met or worked with low thousands of people at this point.
If I had to guess, probably 100 000 Vim daily drivers and maybe 20 000 Emacs daily drivers, both for extended periods of time. Dabblers probably 2-3x that at any time.
AloysB · · focus · HN ↗
You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.
As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.
I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.
But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim. Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.
Wheen · · focus · HN ↗
Though, I realize now the "hundreds of thousands" claim I was responding to is per week, while my guess is all time.
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
True, but I think even OpenClaw usage has falled off a cliff, plus that makes it implicit usage, most OpenClaw users probably don't care either way, it was chosen for them and they probably don't think much about it.
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
Mashimo · · focus · HN ↗
Not a proof, but that makes it sound more plausible, no?