Vim was my preferred text editor for nearly eighteen years, until I switched to aretext in 2021. I appreciated vim’s efficiency and ubiquity, the way I could rely on it regardless of what project I was working on or what machine I had ssh’d into. Like any software, however, vim reflects the time in which it was written. In many cases, vim optimizes for speed above all else, an approach that made sense given the limitations of late ’90s computers.