In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be around to answer questions, help with homework, etc.
The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs.
And that's the story of how I became a life-long Vim user. :-)
When I started at school we all got unix shell accounts mostly for email. Later years got bumped out into multiple machines but for that one year almost all of us were on the same 8 core box (and seriously clamped down quotas)
Within a few weeks, a friend of a friend of a friend had figured out how to pull pranks, and that opened the floodgates. Soon we all knew about man pages, about commands to query utmp and wtmp (to deduce who just did what to you or a friend), grep, file permissions, tty write permissions, quotas, nntp.
The most fun was when someone did something to you without figuring out how to stop it from being done right back to them. Many a kernel was cat'ed to someone else's terminal.
Even today when I'm trying to troubleshoot, half of the stuff I'm using was first used trying to seek revenge on a prankster. Once in a while I wonder if this would be a good way to teach a class on Unix.
Life long vim user that was initiated by the terminal here, vim has a special place in my heart, not because the amount of customization that I was able to add, but because it enabled me to write actual diary.
All I had to do was to type $diary in the terminal and I'm writing my diary in vim. I had never had more extensive record of my life. My distracted ass would never have managed this without that kind of access.
I’ve had something like this for about three years now, except it doesn’t open vim, I just use a single read command and it appends whatever I type with a time stamp. One file per quarter. And there’s a cron job to pop up a window each hour to remind me to type what I’m working on.
I’ve used this to figure out how much time I spent on certain tasks by sampling it Monte Carlo style. And sometimes when I run into some weird non-googleable problem, it happens again a few months later and the solution is in those files.
It’s like my own real-life syslog. Or like a scientist’s lab notebook.
(Life-long vimmer here) At the bootcamp I teach at, one of our students almost became a life-long VIM user today, too: he had accidentally opened it and didn't know how to exit ;-) . Unfortunately, my co-worker helped him before I could introduce him to our dark ways.
My wife and I took a month long honeymoon. Really hoped it'd be as close as possible to one of those Tim Ferris-esque "mini retirements." The first morning I awoke early with some serious jet lag and couldn't really figure out what to do while she was still sleeping. So of course I rewrote my whole vim config from scratch and had a blast doing it.
The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs.
And that's the story of how I became a life-long Vim user. :-)