The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on “the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.
…Neovim anyone?
(Bless his soul, tho, that goes without saying)
I was using Vim only and didn’t want switch to Neovim. Then someday, after having performance problems in Vim, I gave Neovim a shot and switch to it. Shortly after the world was in shock when we knew Bram died. It was the day when I switched to Neovim. I feel like responsible for this.
If you have a Facebook, X or Amazon account, I hope you can find it in your heart to switch to one of their competitors. It’s worth a try.
For Xitter, BlueSky is drop-in replacement that’s superior in most respects. I’m not aware of any equivants for Facebook or Amazon.
For Xitter, BlueSky is drop-in replacement
You’re posting this on the Fediverse and still recommending centralized corporate social media? We can do better than make the same mistakes again and again.
Try Mastodon as a Xitter replacement.
Friendica as a Facebook replacement.
And if you’re able and have transport, support your local businesses by buying products locally (especially independently owned stores), instead of ordering from Amazon.
I don’t really see the point in a “facebook competitior” since the only appeal of facebook is that it’s “normal” and “evryone” is on it, something that just isn’t going to be true for e.g. some fediverse product. Everyone should stop using facebook if possible though, I’m trying to persuade different messenger groupchats that I’m part of to switch to something else left and right personally
Guess what? I still use Reddit, too, because content on Lemmy is extremely scarce in comparison. Mastodon is likewise a fringe network. I’ve barely even heard the name Friendica so I can be certain there are approximately zero people I know there. Shopping local is great when local businesses actually put their prices and inventory online, but they rarely do.
I’m not aware of any equivants for Facebook…
I went with just not using it, has been amazing :)
Good for you, but I like being invited to parties.
I guess I’m just cool enough I get invited regardless? Or I find out about events in other ways. I’m fine to miss a thing here or there because I don’t give my data to Zuck tho.
Edit: Also glad I’m not on there anymore considering the whole LGBT stuff that’s happened this week.
Wish I had.
For some reasons, each time I try neovim I go back to vim due to the performance.
And each time I am retrying, the worse it is.
What’s the real benefits of neovim I ask myself? I got a fast editor and I am not a “plugin addict”. I got my editor and all what I really want is edit text…
I’m the same way. Honestly I just like the built in terminal emulator for those few times I forget to open tmux first. Not a fan of the lua integration. Makes the initial startup slower for my config.
How do you even notice performance issues in a cli editor? 🤨
Some features/plugins can be quite taxing on the system and in extreme cases it can slow the editor down to the point of being unusable. I’m a happy Neovim user with a LazyVim setup, but I experience this extreme slowdown for some JSON files and I haven’t looked into it yet to see what causes it.
You can let your editor do the same compute intensive or memory hogging things that a GUI editor does. The fact that it runs in your terminal doesn’t make it lightweight by definition.
I use Neovim, love their Lua direction.
Nah, neovim made too many breaking changes and prioritizes the wrong things. I’d much rather the spirit of vim continue, albeit with a better organizational structure.
Curious: what are the wrong things it had prioritised?
Saved the video for later, but does anyone have a synopsis of the recco? Is switching to neovim the answer or are they taking the vim repo in a specific direction?
I scrubbed through it quickly.
First half is about housekeeping, history, funding, etc.
Second half is about future directions and it seems conservative. No huge changes planned, other than a new website. :) Discussed encouraging new developers, polling users for what to do next, maintaining quality.
Ended with some q&a.
9.2 will include XDG (.dotfiles) and Wayland support.
What does wayland support mean in the context of vim? Like wayland clipboard or what?
One should probably search the commits for wayland but I am on mobile right now:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Avim%2Fvim+wayland&type=issues
Appears to be the GUI version and the clipboard support, yes.
… and your reply.
Thank you.
I’ve pasted it into an AI video summarizer and got the following.
The Evolution of Vim After Bram Moolenaar: A Year of Change and Continuity
By Albert HarmonPublished December 8, 20244 min readTechnology
TLDRThis blog post discusses the significant changes in the Vim community and project following the passing of its founder, Bram Moolenaar. It covers the transition of leadership, the restructuring of maintainers, ongoing development, and future directions for Vim, emphasizing community involvement and the importance of maintaining the project’s legacy.
In August of last year, the Vim community faced a profound loss with the passing of its founder, Bram Moolenaar. This event marked a pivotal moment for the Vim project, prompting a reevaluation of its leadership and future direction. In this post, we will explore the changes that have occurred in the Vim community and project since that time, highlighting the efforts to maintain continuity while also embracing new contributors.
Who Am I?
I have been an active member of the Vim community since around 2006, contributing to various aspects of the project, including bug reports, code patches, and feature enhancements. My journey began with simple contributions and evolved into more significant features, such as the GN text object and improved encryption support. After a period of reduced activity due to personal and professional commitments, I became one of the main maintainers of Vim following Bram’s passing.
The Impact of Bram’s Passing
Bram Moolenaar was not only the founder of Vim but also its guiding force for nearly 30 years. His extensive knowledge and vision for the project were invaluable. Following his death, the community faced the challenge of continuing the project without his leadership. The initial silence on the Vim mailing list raised concerns about the project’s future, prompting discussions among the remaining maintainers about how to proceed.
Restructuring the Leadership
Before Bram’s passing, the Vim project had three main maintainers: Bram, myself, and Ken. With Bram’s absence, we needed to restructure the leadership. We decided to follow GitHub’s deceased user policy, which allows for the continuation of a project when a maintainer is no longer active. However, this process proved complicated, requiring paperwork and access permissions.
Fortunately, Bram’s family granted us the necessary access rights, enabling us to invite new maintainers to the project. Notable new contributors included Yapan, Dominic P, and Duck KS, who brought their expertise and long-standing commitment to the Vim community.
Managing Project Resources
The Vim project encompasses more than just source code; it requires management of various resources, including the Vim homepage, domains, email accounts, and security reporting. The homepage, which had been hosted on SourceForge, faced issues that necessitated a move to a more reliable hosting solution. We successfully migrated the homepage to a new host, ensuring it was updated to modern standards.
Additionally, we addressed the management of domains and SSL certificates, ensuring that all resources were secure and accessible. The transition also involved retiring the outdated FTP server, as modern users typically download software directly from the homepage or GitHub.
Community Engagement and Charity Work
Bram was known for his charitable work with the ICCF, which supports children in Uganda. After his passing, we continued to support this cause, with Vim users generously donating over €90,000 in the past year. We maintained the donation links on the Vim homepage, ensuring that contributions were directed to the ICCF.
Development and Future Directions
Despite the challenges, development on Vim has continued actively. After Bram’s passing, we saw a spike in commits as we gained access to the repository and began addressing the backlog of pull requests. The release of Vim 9.1 marked a significant milestone, concluding the Vim 9 class support that Bram had been working on.
Looking ahead, we aim to maintain a balance between introducing new features and preserving the stability and backward compatibility that Vim is known for. The community’s involvement is crucial, and we encourage contributions in various forms, from bug reporting to documentation and feature development.
Conclusion
The past year has been a transformative period for the Vim project. While we mourn the loss of Bram Moolenaar, we are committed to honoring his legacy by ensuring that Vim continues to thrive as a community-driven project. We invite all users and contributors to engage with us, share their ideas, and help shape the future of Vim.
If you enjoy using Vim, please consider supporting the ICCF, as there are many who would benefit from the opportunities that education and resources can provide. Thank you for being part of the Vim community.
Said AI needs to learn the difference between summary and transcription.
Anything is better than having to watch a video that should have been a blog post
Thank-you for that question …
Vim is dead as soon as Helix lands in debian repositories. People need to let go of stoneage tools. 😅
for the terminal
no thank you
there is currently no plugin system available
lmao
Well, thats exactly the reason you don’t need vim. Check its feature maybe.
it’s not just that this is not for me. i genuinely don’t see the point of a terminal-only editor (even vim has a gui version) without any extensibility. the reason vim and emacs are still being used despite being old and full of cruft is that their extensibility makes them very adaptable. treesitter et al seem enough now, but what about ten years from now?
it’s also weird their motivation for being terminal-only is better performance, as if guis are this super resource intensive thing and not something that’s been mainstream for at least 30 years
Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn’t automatically make a tool better
e.g.?
The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.
Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup
:maketo run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use:Cfilterto focus on one type of error and then:cdoto for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.
Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim
Yea I mean it depends obviously on the use case. But the defaults in Helix properly reached this millennium compared to vim, where you first need to get through guides in order to understand how to properly set it up.
Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.
Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.
but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.
With Vim you have that as well.
Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.
I’ll give you my vim when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Took a look at it and it didn’t grab me. Different preferences for different people. I hope Helix continues to grow but I’ve no interest in it myself.
Fair enough, but somebody who didn’t invest heavy into vim, there is no purpose to do now. Helix has better defaults and the differences in movement make more sense to me.
I agree with you when that tool is X11.
I don’t understand.
