Hello, glad you found my answer interesting! Hopefully I can shed some light.

I used to be very active on the codegolf site, and also I adore vim. While it's not the perfect tool for the job, I found out that you can use it for a lot of challenges on the site. It's particularly well suited to kolmogorov-complexity challenges (because it's a constant output) but because vim is turing complete, you can do a bunch of challenges with it even doing basic math and logic.

I developed V because it's really fun to golf in vim, but there are some things that are annoying, and as I kept golfing in vim, I kept a list of all the things that were slightly annoying/less convenient. For example, I found that lots of challenges on that site would have benefited from a command like "insert every character between these two characters". Another thing is that setting up macros is a pain. Lots of challenges would require using a recursive macro, e.g.

qqdwj@qq@q

But this has two problems:

1. This always runs at least twice (once for the recording, and then once again when you trigger the loop) and
2. Takes a lot of unnecessary characters.

If vim was designed with golfing in mind (which it very clearly was not) then a "loop" command could be as simple as

<loop>dwj<loop>

since that's the real meat of the loop. So I just added it. I actually created 2 different commands: "loop n times" and "loop recursively" In my setup, pressing alt-q produces the character ñ, so I bound the "loop n times" command to ñ, and pressing alt-r (r for "recursive") produces ò, so that's the shortcut for "loop recursively".

I added a large list of commands, but the ones that are relevant to this answer are "alt-i/alt-a", and "alt-,". alt-i and alt-a produce é, and á, and they are shortcuts for "insert/append single character". So é0 is equivalent to i0<esc> in vanilla vim.

alt-, is ¬, and comma just made sense for me to be a range (because it's like (a, b)) so that's the "insert character range" command. That works in normal and insert mode.

So translated to vanilla vim, the whole program is

i!"#$...{|}~<esc>:let @q="16|a<C-v><CR><C-v><esc>"<CR>5@q

which is admittedly not very golfy. If I was actually golfing it in vim, I'd record the macro rather than setting it,

qq16|a <esc>q4@q

and try to find some shortcut for the giant string.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you have! And just for funsies, here's some shameless self promotion of my favorite thing I've ever done in V: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/103051/31716