Bram Moolenaar, creator, maintainer & BFDL of vim, passed away

Hélène

Dear all,

It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.
Bram was suffering from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.

Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.

We as family are now arranging the funeral service of Bram which will take place in The Netherlands and will be held in the Dutch lanuage. The extact date, time and place are still to be determined.
Should you wish to attend his funeral then please send a message to funer...@gmail.com. This email address can also be used to get in contact with the family regarding other matters, bearing in the mind the situation we are in right now as family.

With kind regards,
The family of Bram Moolenaar

https://groups.google.com/g/vim_announce/c/tWahca9zkt4

johann

Not really a vim user (not emacs user either though!), but out of morbid curiosity I think it will be interesting to see if and how vim as a project will continue.

Also makes me think about, if Bram had been a bit older maybe he would have prepared some kind of succession plan or mentioned vim in his testament? Also I guess an interesting question in general, e.g. thinking about what if one day Linus Torvalds will no longer be the main developer of Linux for some (probably sad) reason.

toast

johann There is a current secondary maintainer.
As for vim as a project, it has lost a lot of its relevancy already because of neovim.
Neovim has much less legacy cruft, and also lets you use lua in place of vimscript, so it's quickly gained way more popularity.
Initially it was a "80% of vim in 20% of the code", but now it straight up has a superset of features like built-in LSP and treesitter.

Hélène

johann It seems like a fair amount was planned, as the family was able to hand over quite a few things to the other maintainer...

As for Torvalds, well, it seems like the Foundation has made sure everyone was handling separate sections of the kernel and the job, and they already handle situations where he goes on vacation. I think the kernel would be fine if he were to retire; maybe not as clean without his rants and strong opinions (most of which are very founded, by experience).