Degoogling Guide: Vim Edition

When you search for "vi" and Google immediately suggests "Did you mean: emacs" - that's not a search engine, that's a declaration of war in the text editor holy wars. Google just picked a side in the oldest developer rivalry known to mankind. Next they'll be suggesting "Did you mean: spaces" when you search for tabs. The audacity!

The eternal battle of development environments! On the left, we have sleek iPads representing modern Apple hardware—thin, light, beautiful, and probably costs more than your monthly rent. On the right? A battle-hardened ThinkPad running Linux with terminal windows that look like they're decrypting the Matrix. Plot twist: that ancient ThinkPad has survived three coffee spills, two office moves, and can compile kernel code while the iPad is still trying to figure out if it's a computer or a really expensive cutting board. The real punchline? That 10-year-old ThinkPad with its mechanical keyboard and enough ports to connect to NASA is probably the one actually shipping production code. Those stickers aren't decoration—they're battle scars!

Left side: spending 3 hours customizing your IDE theme, installing 47 VS Code extensions, and tweeting about your "coding setup" before writing a single line of code. Right side: that senior dev who's still using Vim, hasn't changed his terminal color scheme since 2008, and somehow ships more features in a day than you do all sprint. The Olympics of productivity aren't won with fancy gear, kids.

The rare sighting of a programming purist in the wild! This developer has achieved mythical status by rejecting all modern conveniences: No cursor? Check. No AI assistants? Check. No search engine? Check. Just a human, a rusty ThinkPad, Vim, man pages, and Arch Linux. This is like watching someone hunt with a sharpened stick while everyone else uses rifles. Either this person is the final boss of programming or they're just showing off their digital masochism in public. The "psychopath" label is just what normal devs call someone who makes them feel guilty about their 57 Chrome tabs of Stack Overflow answers.

The evolution of our species is brutal. In 1992, programmers were hardcore beasts writing their own drivers—diving into assembly code and hardware specs like digital gladiators. Fast forward to today, and we're all crying because we accidentally opened Vim and now we're trapped in a text editor prison with no visible escape hatches. The command is :q! by the way, but that knowledge only comes after the emotional damage is done. The transition from "I bend computers to my will" to "help, my computer is bullying me" is the most accurate timeline of programming history ever created.

Remember when programmers were basically coding demigods who could bend computers to their will? Now we're just sad creatures Googling "how to center div" for the 500th time and begging AI to fix our mistakes. The golden age programmer wrote code without StackOverflow, crafted entire games in Assembly (you know, that language that makes you want to cry), manually fixed memory leaks with pointers, and literally hand-coded the software that put humans on the freaking moon. Meanwhile, modern programmers are trapped in Vim wondering why :q doesn't work, fixing one bug only to create three more like some kind of hydra nightmare, and asking ChatGPT to solve problems we should probably understand ourselves. The decline is real, folks. But hey, at least we have dark mode now.