Vim is so complicated, over a million people have looked up how to exit it on Stack Overflow

Vim is a brilliant text editor. When you finally wrap your head around its idiosyncrasies and general weirdness, you find yourself way more productive than you were before, and the very idea of going back seems unthinkable.

But it’s different, though. Hugely different. Vim works in a way that’s unlike anything else, and it took me a few weeks of deliberate practice to get anywhere close to productive. Thankfully, I started learning it during a software development internship, where there was no expectation for me to be an A-grade player.

Highlighting the difficulties that people have when it comes to learning Vim, Stack Overflow just published a hilarious blog post charting the traffic to one question in particular: “How to exit the Vim editor?“

Over one million people have visited this question, which is itself rather funny. This represents one out of ever 20,000 visits to the site.

This question also represents a disproportionate amount of traffic to questions about Vim. When organized by country, this is what it looks like.

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And in case you’re wondering, exiting Vim is simple. First, tap the escape key. If you want to save the file you’re working on before leaving, type “:wq” and hit return. Otherwise, type “:q!”, or “:q” if you didn’t modify the file. Of course, Vim being the versatile editor it is, there are a myriad of ways you can quit a file.