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.