A lot of the comment's I've seen everywhere over this news is "exiting vim" out of respect and admiration. They aren't being disrespectful but honoring the legacy that he fostered, and remembering the hard parts of his software.
I've worked in a few places that were full of Linux nerds (including my current job). We totally use sed style replacements and joke about vim escape keys (especially the classic :q). So you just need nerdier friends (as in ramped up to 11).
This is why it works so well. It's also one of the reasons I prefer vi over other text editors. It isn't always the most logical which commands and keys do what, but I like the consistency.
The hjkl keys came from Bill Joy when he wrote vi. The terminal he was using had arrows printed on those keys because it didn't have dedicated arrow keys. It was a natural progression to reuse those keys for navigation.
vim was a huge improvement over vi. To where it became the defacto replacement. Some distros even shipped vim as a replacement for vi. That was because the Linux Standard Base required vi to be present.
Still a huge influence. vi was a bit painful to use when coming from vim. Would hjkl have died out if it wasn't for vim? IDK. I think it would have been relegated to a niche corner of the unix/linux world.
The guy onse famously responded to the question of how the community can ensure that vim project succeeds for the forseeable future with "keep me alive". Seems like there is our fault :(
Great words. He may be gone now but he's got all us nerds in here thanking him and pondering the good ol days where his passion helped so many. Shit could be our eulogy from lemmy.
We as family are now arranging the funeral service of Bram which will take place in The Netherlands and will be held in the Dutch lanuage. The extact date, time and place are still to be determined.