Vim's UserGettingBored autocmd

In short: Vim has a joke autocmd called UserGettingBored that doesn’t do anything.

Vim’s automatic commands feature, usually shortened to “autocmd”, lets you run code when various events occur. For example, you could implement an auto-save feature by binding the TextChanged event to the :w command.

Vim has over 100 events, from “buffer was created” to “file was saved”. But one of them sticks out to me: UserGettingBored. Here’s the documentation:

UserGettingBored: When the user presses the same key 42 times. Just kidding! :-)

When I saw this, I was busy doing something else and it completely derailed me. “I must know more,” I thought.

Here’s what I found:

• Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything. It only exists in the documentation (and some tests). If you try to use it with somethig like autocmd UserGettingBored ..., you’ll get a “no such group or event” error.
• It’s present in Vim, Neovim, and Vim Classic.
• It was first added by Bram Moolenaar in July 2000, over a year before Vim 6.0 was released. The original description was, “When the user hits CTRL-C. Just kidding!” And it didn’t do anything back then, so I don’t think it’s ever been real.
• In August 2001, he added the smiley face to the documentation. It then read, “When the user hits CTRL-C. Just kidding! :-)”
• Twelve years later, in 2013, the description changed to its current iteration: “When the user presses the same key 42 times. Just kidding! :-)”

In 2022, developer Mike Smith created an unofficial plugin inspired by this joke autocmd. If you press the same key 42 times in Insert mode, a picture of Samuel L. Jackson appears. 22 years later, it’s finally real.