I was passionate about programming from the first day I started to write code as a child. Until that day computers had been for entertainment, but that day I understood that computers could actually do useful things when I told them to, and that they were very powerful, but also very stupid: they follow your instructions blindly.
When I was at university a friend who studied computer science installed Linux on my laptop, and that was a breath of fresh air after a few years of using a proprietary operating system by Microsoft: Finally a system that did what I told it to do, and not one that made me do things the way it wanted.
After using emacs for a few months I started to use Vim. It has a learning curve, not a steep one, but it has one. I worked through that and was rewarded with a text editor that could do what I wanted, and most importantly, that was open source and not produced by a company that could eventually go out of business.
There are very few programs that seem irreplaceable to me, and Vim is probably at the top of that list. It has been a constant in my life from my days as a student until today, with a few years of neglect when I tried to work on OS X. Vim is a window into the computer, the software, the operating system and the hardware, a window through which I can give instructions to those systems and change how they behave.
Thank you Bram
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