People could select more than one option in that survey (87,317 responses; select all that apply). You'll notice that the results add up to more than 100%. Most people who have to remote in to a server will be forced into using Vim sometimes, which will skew the results. Also, I would say that people who would respond to a SO survey arent a representative sample of all developers.
I do not use Vim as a daily driver at all, but I have to use it sometimes because I have no other choice (remoted in to a box). So if I had to say which editors I used, Vim would be there... sometimes.
You're misinterpreting that graph. The key detail to note there is that the bars don't add up to 100%. Meaning that it's showing what percentage of people use that IDE/editor at all. The phrasing, "~25% of web devs... used vim as their editor," implies that 1 in 4 web devs use it as their primary or preferred editor, which is not something that can be inferred from the data.
For my part, when I answered the survey, I checked vscode, intellij, vim, jupyter, emacs, and rstudio. Most of those are there because they're my preferred editor for some task or other, but vim is only there because it's the only editor I can expect to have available on every server I ssh into. So, while I did say that I use vim in the survey, I would encourage you not to count me as a vim user for the purposes of any popularity debates.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I think it's highly industry and probably project dependent.
If company policy is that "we use X", then probably you're not going to have many people stray from that. The bigger the organization, the more likely you are to have strict guidelines in place like that.
I would guess people on Windows are also less likely to reach for Vim than any of the many other alternatives. If you're using Linux, you probably have a different view on the world to begin with, and are more likely to go with vim over whatever is the "new hot editor". I've heard Mac users like to reach for XCode, but I don't actually know many developers outside of work, and none of them use Macs, so I don't know.
Besides the other facts mentioned by the other commenters, Vim has a sort of geek-chic aspect to it. It's "cool" to be a Vim user in certain circles. That inflates the numbers plus it also causes a "New Year's resolution" effect where someone would say they use it just because they know :wq and this year they're really, really going to go to the gym, oh, sorry, going to use Vim proficiently for a real project.
~25% of web devs in the SO 2019 survey said they used VIM as their editor. Amongst dev-ops that number is higher, around 40%.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...
So your anecdotal example of "99% of people using VS or VSCode" doesn't ring true for the industry as a whole.