Bill Joy wrote vi in 1976 over a single weekend, on a terminal so slow that watching characters appear on screen was a spectator sport. To compensate for the lag, he invented modal editing: a scheme where the same keystrokes mean entirely different things depending on which mode you’re in. Forty-nine years later, vim — vi’s turbo-charged descendant — remains one of the most-used text editors on the planet, largely because it’s the default on almost every Unix system and there is no obvious way to leave it. Stack Overflow’s most-visited question for years was “How do I exit vim?” Over a million developers have needed the answer. Joy has presumably never lost sleep over this.
