this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Go beyond the lazy memes and see for yourself why it has such a loyal cult!
https://openvim.com/
Because they grew up with it? I cant think of any other reason. I used it in college for a class bcz my old as fuck professor required it. Its obtuse, old, and doesn't have a lot of functionality of modern code editors.
The only people who want to use it are people who started with it decades ago, or people who were forced to use it, and now think they're superior somehow to everyone else who doesn't use it.
I was also forced to use it at uni (a few decades ago), but didn't start using it until professionally until several years into my dev career. I promise that I don't think I'm superior because I use it. But I do encourage junior developers to learn it for reasons that appealed to me.
Among other things, appealing things are modal editing (the biggest advantage IMO), it runs on pretty much on any server you will be ssh'ing into, less IDE lock in. And, there's a bunch of additional things that other editors do that I think Vim does better: regex is first class in the environment, extensible workflows, macros. Then there are definite advantages being able to quickly navigate from the home row.
I agree that some people will demonstrate their enthusiasm by bragging and being pretentious. But I don't think that's why they stick with Vim.