How Did Vim Become So Popular?
Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times.<p>I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ etc. But the "Vim guy" is the by far the loudest guy in the room when it comes to discussing his editor, tries to tell everyone else why their editor sucks, how superior Vim is, etc etc. Meanwhile all the users of VS and other editors quietly get along with their work and feel no reason to advocate for their editor like it was a religion.<p>At my current company it's the same. We have maybe 300 engineers. 99% of them use VS or VSCode, there's probably one or two guys using Vim and still telling everyone else they're dumb for using VS... In 50 years when things have changed completely, there will probably still be some guys using Vim telling everyone else they're wrong for using VR Coding with voice recognition (or whatever is happening in the world of coding then).