This morning, a popular Stack Overflow question hit a major milestone:
You’re not alone, jclancy. In the five years since this question was asked, there have been over a million other developers who got stuck in Vim and couldn’t escape without a bit of help. Indeed, the difficulty of quitting the Vim editor is a common joke among developers.
I’ve been told by experienced Vim users that this reputation is unfair, and I’m sure they’re right (even I’ve gotten the hang of it in the last few years). I think there are two reasons it’s easy to forget how to exit Vim: developers are often dropped into Vim from a git command or another situation where they didn’t expect to be, and they run into it infrequently enough to forget how they solved it last time.
In honor of this milestone, we decided to take a look at the data surrounding this question. In particular, we’ll try measuring who is most likely to get stuck in Vim as opposed to using it intentionally, and examining how that balance varies by country and by programming language.
How many people have been struggling to exit Vim?
In the last year, How to exit the Vim editor has made up about .005% of question traffic: that is, one out of every 20,000 visits to Stack Overflow questions. That means during peak traffic hours on weekdays, there are about 80 people per hour that need help getting out of Vim.
Has the percentage of traffic it makes up changed over time? That is, have developers started learning to exit Vim on their own?
It doesn’t look like it. The question was asked in August 2012, and for a few months it got very little traffic. Then it began growing in the following two years, presumably as more sources linked to it online and it moved to the top of search engine results. It’s been relatively steady for the last two years. This doesn’t necessarily mean the same people visited it again and again, of course; it could represent relatively new programmers getting stuck in Vim for the first time.
