Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers?
I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users.
If I had a horse in the race I'd focus on the developer experience. Make it easier to extend, make the runtime faster (the native compilation stuff is super cool), better unicode support, alternate input methods, etc. If people want to use it for publishing it should be easy to write a package to cater to those users.
For me, a long time emacs user, I think the biggest concern I have is ensuring that the project is sustained by new developers.
I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users.
If I had a horse in the race I'd focus on the developer experience. Make it easier to extend, make the runtime faster (the native compilation stuff is super cool), better unicode support, alternate input methods, etc. If people want to use it for publishing it should be easy to write a package to cater to those users.
For me, a long time emacs user, I think the biggest concern I have is ensuring that the project is sustained by new developers.