[jez]

I have a pretty similar story. I was in senior year of high school and one of the colleges I was applying to had a “sleeping bag weekend” where you could sign up to stay overnight with a random CS freshman in the dorms and stroll the campus.

I saw someone working on their homework and their terminal had colored text and it blew my mind (I had only ever seen cmd.exe using black and white with that ugly font).

The summer between senior year of high school and starting college I installed Ubuntu and googled that program called “vim” that freshman had demoed to me. From there it was just like you say: vimtutor and reading :help pages, and now almost 10 years later I can’t imagine trading Vim for anything.