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This forenoon, a popular Stack Overflow question hit a major milestone:

You're not alone, jclancy. In the five years since this question was asked, at that place have been over a million other developers who got stuck in Vim and couldn't escape without a flake of aid. 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 (fifty-fifty I've gotten the hang of it in the terminal few years). I think there are two reasons information technology'southward like shooting fish in a barrel to forget how to exit Vim: developers are often dropped into Vim from a git command or another state of affairs where they didn't look to be, and they run into information technology infrequently enough to forget how they solved it last time.

In laurels of this milestone, we decided to take a await at the information surrounding this question. In item, nosotros'll try measuring who is most likely to go 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 concluding year, How to leave the Vim editor has made up about .005% of question traffic: that is, one out of every twenty,000 visits to Stack Overflow questions. That ways during peak traffic hours on weekdays, there are about fourscore people per 60 minutes that demand help getting out of Vim.

Has the percentage of traffic information technology makes up changed over fourth dimension? That is, accept developers started learning to leave Vim on their own?

It doesn't look similar it. The question was asked in Baronial 2012, and for a few months it got very little traffic. So it began growing in the following 2 years, presumably as more sources linked to information technology 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 form; information technology could correspond relatively new programmers getting stuck in Vim for the first time.

Differences beyond countries

Equally we saw in a previous blog postal service, we can use Stack Overflow traffic to learn a lot about the geographical distribution of developers.

Let'due south consider what percentage of visits to Vim this question comprises within each country. In countries with a lot of experienced Vim users, we'd wait this pct to be depression. When information technology's high, it indicates many users got stuck in Vim when they didn't necessarily expect to.

Information technology looks like developers in Ukraine, Turkey and Indonesia are getting stuck in Vim quite a bit: it makes upward a larger portion of their Vim questions than in whatsoever other country. In contrast, in China, Korea and Nihon the fraction going to this question is i-tenth as much. That might indicate that when developers in these countries enter Vim, they ordinarily meant to do so, and they know how to get out of it.

What kind of programmers get stuck in Vim?

It'south also likely that users of different programming languages will have dissimilar experiences with Vim. We tin investigate this by stratifying the "Exit Vim / Total Vim" pct across each user's main programming engineering science.

We'll define this based on what Stack Overflow tag they visit most often. (For example, my most visited tag is R: it makes up 52% of my question views). It's not a perfect measure, but it's reliable plenty to give a sense of the breakdown past language. (For this analysis, we considered simply registered users with at least 100 visits to the site).

The developers who are most likely to go stuck in Vim are front-stop web developers: those who primarily visit tags similar JQuery, CSS, and AngularJS. They're followed by Microsoft developers (C# and SQL Server) and mobile (Android and iOS). These developers usually piece of work with an IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Xcode, and so on), rather than a obviously text editor, and so it makes sense that they're relatively more probable to go "stuck" in Vim rather than to open it intentionally.

The developers least likely to get stuck in Vim are those who programme in C, C++, Python and Ruby. These languages make sense to me: they are a combination of low-level languages and scripting languages that are ofttimes used with a plain text editor rather than an IDE, and then they take the experience to escape it without a Google search.

Conclusion

I was tickled when I saw this question approach a million visits, but I was also proud that I work for, and contribute answers to, a site that helps so many developers. Y'all never know when an respond you contribute could aid millions of people, whether it shares how to undo a git commit or how the yield keyword in Python works.

If you want to contribute yourself, we encourage you to bring together the earth's largest developer customs, whether it's to ask and answer questions, go your side by side job, or build your online presence with a Developer Story. You can too use tools like Stack Overflow Trends to larn more nearly what our data tin tell you about software developers.

In whatever example, next time you solve your trouble through Stack Overflow, recall the hundreds of thousands of users who regularly inquire, answer, edit, and moderate the site to make information technology all possible.

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Source: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping-one-million-developers-exit-vim/

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