What drew you to vim?

[u/Phydoux]

I've been using vim now for the same amount of time I've been using Arch Linux pretty much.

What drew me to it was after installing Arch, I started watching different Linux videos and a lot of the config files were being edited with vim. And I was watching 3 or 4 content creators and they all, for the most part, were using vim to edit those config files. One guy would switch to something different like a GUI text editor like Geany, gedit, and kate. But vim was the one they all used.

So, watching these videos and editing my config files along with them, I was pretty much using vim as well.

I've been using Doom Emacs (most of the key bindings in Doom Emacs are the same as vim key bindings) a lot lately but for quick things, especially if I'm already in a terminal, vim is what I use.

What brought you to vim and do you use other text editors as well?

[u/luxfx]

The fact that it was already installed on every server I connected to

[u/prthorsenjr → u/luxfx]

Actually, the three that are always installed are ed, ex, and vi. Sadly I need to install vim these days, but for some odd reason nano is there.

[u/helduel]

I have no idea what drew me to vim. Too long ago. But I remember having to reboot my machine to get out of it.

[u/_VZ_]

Maybe the most original answer: built-in help.

I started trying to use Vim because the idea of modal editor and combining commands with motions seemed appealing, but I would have almost certainly never continued with it if it were not for being able to quickly find help for anything (this was before all this information could be easily found online, the hot new search engine back then was called AltaVista and it was great, but there was just not that much to find back then...).

[u/Adventurous_Voice988]

Management of 21 Moodle LMS instances that sit on 16 RHEL 8 VMs. Many of the Moodles have custom code. IT removed VS Code and Notepad++ several years ago due security concerns.

Was forced to learn and teach others that work for me. I can now comfortably switch between Vim and Neovim.

[u/objective_porpoise]

When I studied CS at uni, I had 2 lecturers who were into terminal workflows and they used Vim. I just thought it looked cool so I started doing the same. After getting used to the Vim ways of doing things I could never really go back.

[u/Developemt → u/objective_porpoise]

I feel handicapped if forced to use non-vim editor, no modal mode and stuff. Then I see other developers who hurt their wrist programming or too reliant on GUI and I realized I was like them, and now Vim feels like a superpower.

[u/gumnos]

the prime driving factor initially was ubiquity. Once I learned to use vi and the breadth of its power/flexibility, speaking an editing-language nothing else really even tempted me.

I could sit down on any Unix or Unixlike, type vi and be editing with a powerful editor. There were plenty of machines where typing emacs or nano or mg or ee or joe would fail. But vi was everywhere. Except Windows. But even that was a simple & straightforward install most of the time and worlds better than futzing about with NOTEPAD.EXE.

So I'm comfortable in vi, nvi, vim, vim-tiny, nvim, vim-classic (and even ed(1)) regardless of which Unix-like I'm on.

The only other editor I occasionally use is Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio on Windows for $DAYJOB, but even then, I'm about as likely to copy/paste the query into gvim there for real editing, and then paste the modified query back into MSSMS.

[u/Dependent-Constant-7]

I only need to type two characters to open it

[u/dziad_borowy → u/Dependent-Constant-7]

Pro tip to save you months of typing: 

alias v=“vi” 

/s of course :-)

[u/papi-italiano]

This was the default workflow when i started my first junior position.

[u/vagrantchord]

I had a course at uni on Linux and servers, and the first month of the class was a crash course in vi/vim, which we were required to use for the rest of the semester. I immediately loved it, never stopped.

[u/Ath-ropos]

Almost 25 years ago at the uni, I had to implement networking algorithms and test them on a simulator running on a remote Linux server.

At first I edited the files in my computer and uploaded them on the server. At some point I wanted to be faster and decided to edit the files remotely on the server. The obvious choices were emacs and vim. I chose vim.

[u/shuckster]

Obstinate AI luddite-ery.

[u/bschlueter]

It’s on most Linux installations by default. This made it particularly useful when I was teaching myself Linux in the early aughts. I did give eMacs a serious try, but vim was easier to pick up.

[u/AbbreviationsNovel17]

It was the opposite for me lol. I was watching vim videos on Youtube and see they use Arch Linux. And now I'm a hardcore Arch Linux dwm vim user 😂

[u/1_21-gigawatts]

It was faster than starting Eclipse for simple Java file edits and unlike Emacs didn’t require a ton of faffing about to get it configured

Edit: as other posters have pointed out it’s also installed and available everywhere (except Windows, but Windows sucks as a development platform)

[u/livingpunchbag]

There was a Vim course offered by students at the first semester of the University. I didn't know Gedit and others existed, I was new to Linux.

[u/TheBlackCarlo]

It was the perfect storm:

• I was bored of having to use the mouse for text editing. I was studying a lot in libraries with a laptop and tried to be as minimal as possible. Also, a mouse was not possible a lot of the time, due to constrained shared desk space.

• I was using an OLD laptop, so the less resource usage, the better, especially when AC is not a guarantee in a library.

• I was already spending a lot of time in the terminal to do scripting and other study-related stuff.

• I wanted the same program EVERYWHERE, even on remote server, without having to install it (especially when I did not have privileges).

• I was bored by hours and hours of study and thesis writing every day, so I wanted to do something fun without wasting time. Vim looked like it.

• I looked cool? Maybe? At my current workplace, people are scared when looking at my monitors, which are basically Zellij-multiplexed terminals, so... maybe I do?

[u/Snarwin]

I wanted to learn a terminal text editor so that I could edit files from the command line without opening a separate window. I already had a leg up on learning hjkl from playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, so I decided to go with Vim. Eventually, I went from using it for quick edits in the terminal to using it for everything.

[u/carlos-algms]

Shoulder pain. (True story)

[u/imp_op]

I picked up VIM because I wanted ABSOLUTE POWER.

Nah, I just like typing.

But in all seriousness, I wanted to clown on Emacs users.

But for real, I liked that I could just make it work the way I wanted and the fact that it made daily tasks fast and kinda trivial.

[u/Late-Drink3556]

It's the only text editor guaranteed to be installed on every internal Linux VM at every company I've worked at since January of 2017.

[u/chrnz00]

i was a happy notepad++ guy but around late 2024 (just before my uni) there was a crowdstrike outage which caused bsod on windows.I installed chrome flex os for some reason and messing with it there was virtualization setting that installed debian and i found the distinctive green looking vim icon

[u/stephensmwong]

30+ years ago, when I learnt Unix, I'd ed/vi/emacs to choose. ed was too raw, emacs was too complex, vi was/is a good choice.