I started my IT career in system operations. I spent many days in a cold data center, racking and stacking servers, installing operating systems, and configuring routers. That’s when I started using Vim. It was nice to sit in my cubicle outside the data center and access my servers to do everything I needed in a terminal, including editing files. I didn’t put any real thought into why Vim. It was just an option available on the command line to allow me to edit files. There were others—Nano, Emacs—and today, I couldn’t honestly tell you why I didn’t opt for one of them instead of Vim. But Vim did the job well, so I stuck with it. by Eric Van Johnson