I think this type of attitude doesn't stop here. Vim is the topic but if you also are taking the easy paths you tend to get stuck. Sometimes you have good tools you just don't know how to use them. That doesn't mean you should throw out the tools you have and buy new ones immediately though. This can work for vim but in general reaching for something that is easy is not always the right solution especially while in college you hace classes yes but you don't have the pressure of actual deadlines and deliverables where you don't have the time to learn

Real life example I have a guy at work who didn't have the time to learn git beyond git clone. He's not a software engineer but his workflow to get things to "work" was to create a new directory everyday and clone the repos he needed. The next day he'd do the same thing again and again until his disk drive was full and than he'd delete the old directories because he thought he didn't need them anymore. This work style was ludicrous but he didn't have the time. 1, 1hour tutorial on git he nows safes the 5 minutes it takes everyday to clone the repo, and the hours lost when he deleted something he needed.

People can learn vim, and git, and insert tool here but we need a culture of teaching and a culture of asking questions. I'd argue the person in question didn't feel comfortable with sharing because they didn't want to look dumb and computer science departments tend to breed that what you can't do it mentality? That causes this problem like I mentioned and the hours of wasted time using vim and scp when you don't know how.