Stack Overflow is celebrating a major milestone with one of its most popular questions. It seems a majority of developers are having difficulty escaping from the Vim editor once inside. Over the past five years, there have been more than a million developers asking “How to exit the Vim editor?”
“Indeed, the difficulty of quitting the Vim editor is a common joke among developers,” David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, wrote in a post.
However, Robinson notes the Vim editor is getting an unfair reputation. “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,” he explained.
To honor this milestone, the online organization has decided to dive deeper into the data surrounding this question. According to Stack Overflow, one out of every 20,000 visits has related to the question, and about 80 people per hour are trying to figure out how to get out of Vim during peak hour weekdays. Since 2012, the traffic towards the question has risen considerably, with it remaining steadily at the top of search engine results over the last two years.
The data also shows developers in Ukraine, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam are having the most trouble exiting Vim. In addition, jQuery, CSS, Angular.js, C# and Android developers are the most likely to get stuck.
