The Text Editor Caste System

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute DEVOLUTION of programmers is too real! 😭 On the left, we have the CHAD programmer of yesteryear - building an ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM FROM SCRATCH, talking directly to God, and casually mentioning CIA conspiracies while coding in 640x480 resolution like some kind of digital BARBARIAN! And what do we have now? A pathetic little doge in a coffee sweater, TRAPPED in Vim, desperately clinging to Stack Overflow and Spotify for emotional support! Can't even exit a text editor without begging for help! The audacity! The TRAGEDY! For the uninitiated: TempleOS was an operating system coded entirely by one man (Terry Davis) who claimed divine inspiration. Meanwhile, Vim is that text editor where generations of programmers have been held hostage because nobody remembers how to exit it (it's :q! by the way, YOU'RE WELCOME).

Ah, the sacred scrolls of developer archetypes. The Barbarian who worships C and recites man pages is just your average Unix greybeard who thinks anything after Perl is heresy. The Rogue is basically every crypto bro with questionable ethics and a VPN. Wizards are those mythical 10x developers whose code is so advanced no one can maintain it after they leave. Clerics are the TDD zealots who'd rather write tests than actually ship anything. And Druids? Just sysadmins who've spent so much time in server rooms they've started identifying as network packets. I've worked with all five. The Druid still owes me $20 and insists I call him "FoxTail69" at happy hour.

The Vim initiation ritual – desperately smashing Esc, random key combos, and eventually grabbing your mouse in frustration because you have no idea how to exit . The true programmer's hazing ceremony. Eight years as a developer and I still sometimes open Vim by accident and feel that same panic. The only difference now is I know to yell ":q!" while crying slightly less.

The bell curve of developer intelligence strikes again. In the middle, the 68% majority just want a text editor that works without drama. Meanwhile, at both extremes of the IQ spectrum, we have the "VSCode is just simpler" crowd who can't be bothered to learn keyboard shortcuts. Then there's the crying Vim zealot, tears streaming down their face while screaming about efficiency and how Electron is bloated. And somewhere in the shadows, VSCodium users silently judge everyone while using essentially the same editor but without Microsoft's telemetry. The irony is delicious.

The eternal Vim trap strikes again! Nothing quite like the cold sweat of realizing you're stuck in a text editor with seemingly no escape. The park ranger says "You cannot exit vim without proper keystrokes" - the digital equivalent of checking your hiking permit before letting you leave the wilderness. Meanwhile, seasoned Linux users smugly flash their "permit" - the sacred sudo shutdown command. It's the programming equivalent of bringing a bulldozer to a gardening competition. Sure, it works, but at what cost? Your unsaved changes send their regards from the void. For the uninitiated: Vim is that text editor your senior dev insists makes them 10x more productive, yet somehow they spend half their day configuring it. The classic escape sequence is :wq or :q! - but why remember that when you can just nuke your entire system?

The evolutionary stages of developer brain expansion! Starting with the humble Notepad (barely firing neurons), progressing to VS Code (some decent neural activity), then leveling up to Vim (significant brain illumination), and finally reaching enlightenment with a custom text editor you built yourself. It's the coding equivalent of going from crawling to building your own rocket ship. The true mark of a developer isn't the code they write, but how unnecessarily complex they've made their text editing experience!