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Tabs, spaces and Vim: developer holy wars, measured

16 questions · by Quizbun

Developers have argued about tabs versus spaces and Vim versus Emacs for decades, and now and then someone collects data. Each Question takes one argument, shows what a survey, a traffic log or a tool's design measured, and asks what you can and can't conclude from it. You'll also learn how to quit Vim.

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Questions

  1. Not answered. In Stack Overflow's 2017 Developer Survey, which group of professional developers reported the higher median salary: tabs users or spaces users?
  2. Not answered. How did the 28,657 professional developers who answered the 2017 indentation question split between tabs, spaces and both?
  3. Not answered. To test whether the salary gap was just a side effect of other differences, Robinson fitted a regression model. Which factors did it control for?
  4. Not answered. A colleague reads the tabs-versus-spaces result and switches their editor to spaces, expecting a raise. What does the evidence support?
  5. Not answered. You're in Vim, you've made changes you don't want, and you want out. Type a command that quits without saving.
  6. Not answered. This time you want to keep your edits. Type a Vim command that saves the file and quits.
  7. Not answered. The Stack Overflow question "How to exit the Vim editor?" was asked in 2012. When did Stack Overflow announce it had helped one million developers?
  8. Not answered. Guess: at weekday peak hours in 2017, about how many people an hour visited Stack Overflow to find out how to exit Vim?
  9. Not answered. Among visitors to Vim questions on Stack Overflow, developers from which group were the most likely to be looking for the exit?
  10. Not answered. What is the most plausible reason front-end developers got stuck in Vim more often than C or Python developers?
  11. Not answered. You run git commit without -m on a machine where you've never configured an editor, and a Vim screen appears. Why?
  12. Not answered. Why does vi, and Vim after it, use modes where single letters are commands, instead of letting you type text right away?
  13. Not answered. Richard Stallman's parody Church of Emacs calls vi "the editor of the beast". Where does the name come from?
  14. Not answered. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 75.9% of respondents said they regularly used VS Code, 24.3% Vim and 14% Neovim. Emacs appeared only as a write-in answer, at 0.15%. Which conclusions does this data support?
  15. Not answered. Guess the year: when did Bill Joy build the visual mode of the ex editor that became vi?
  16. Not answered. Looking back across the Quiz, which of these claims does the evidence support?