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Vim's Creator Bram Moolenaar Dies at Age 62 (google.com) 62
Bram Moolenaar was Vim's creator/maintainer/benevolent-dictator for life. Early this morning his family shared sad news on the Vim-announce Google Group. "It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023." Moolenaar was 62 years old, and died 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."
Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. "You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim's sponsor FAQ notes that "Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features."
Moolenaar's personal web site also includes photos from his travels around the world, and YouTube has some videos of talks and interviews with Moolenaar.
He was still committing changes to Vim up until a month ago.
In the comments below long-time Slashdot reader bads shares a link to a post from long-time Vim contributor Christian Brabandt : Bram was a great leader to the Vim community and I really enjoyed working with him over the past years, since I became involved with the development of Vim almost 20 years ago.
Bram was of great inspiration in creating a great community, helping people with his charity and he was a great mentor. And now he left too soon. We lost a great leader and I regret never having met him in person.
However to all of the community: I will continue and I hope all of the other contributors will also keep up the good work. I do have access to the Vim homepage and the Vim organization (not sure if all the rights, but I am sure we will work on the details in the near future...) I hope together we will be able to continue successfully.
"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."
Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. "You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim's sponsor FAQ notes that "Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features."
Moolenaar's personal web site also includes photos from his travels around the world, and YouTube has some videos of talks and interviews with Moolenaar.
He was still committing changes to Vim up until a month ago.
In the comments below long-time Slashdot reader bads shares a link to a post from long-time Vim contributor Christian Brabandt : Bram was a great leader to the Vim community and I really enjoyed working with him over the past years, since I became involved with the development of Vim almost 20 years ago.
Bram was of great inspiration in creating a great community, helping people with his charity and he was a great mentor. And now he left too soon. We lost a great leader and I regret never having met him in person.
However to all of the community: I will continue and I hope all of the other contributors will also keep up the good work. I do have access to the Vim homepage and the Vim organization (not sure if all the rights, but I am sure we will work on the details in the near future...) I hope together we will be able to continue successfully.
RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, vim is one of a handful of applications that I use pretty much every day. And Bram seems to have been an all around good guy too. It's very sad news, but he leaves a fine legacy.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I've used VIM on every workstation for well over twenty years.
Kudos to him for leaving such a legacy.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but that's just because you couldn't figure out how to exit.
Re: (Score:3)
Typical emacs person - no sense of decorum.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: RIP (Score:1)
Re:Thought he was younger (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously dude this is not the place.
Bram was a pillar in the community. Vim has been the staple of Linux community since the 90s and has continued to serve as both a basic editor on almost every distro up to a fully featured IDE. His contribution is amazing.
Take your fucking grievance politics elsewhere.
Re: (Score:1)
This is slashdot, what do you expect?
Even if some individual, who had literally saved the entire human race from disaster single handed, died, but that person once said or did something they consider "woke", the usual shit heads would be dancing on their grave.
Re: (Score:1)
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Just shut the fuck up about "woke". Take your grievance politics about "wokeness" elsewhere and show some respect.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
You must be amazing at funerals.
I'm here to give a eulogy for the deceased. He was not woke.... what? I'M DeFeNdInG hIm WoKe Is BaD yOu need to know how good he is because he ISN'T woke so you understand how bad woke is.
Really no one wants to hear about your greivance fuelled identity politics and opinions on woke, they certainly don't want to hear it in this thread.
Re: (Score:3)
Haters gonna hate. It must be hard to have a soul so black that you speak ill of the dead so soon after they've left. I hope you can contribute as much as he did. It may eventually cleanse your mind and soul. SMFH.
Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is truly sad. Bram was a good man, and his charity work showed it.
Bram, I did not know you personally, but you have touched many lives, and you will be missed.
May your memory be for a blessing. z''l, RIP.
Re: (Score:2)
Vim should be fine. Look on the bright side... (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like vim will continue to be maintained fine.
https://groups.google.com/g/vi... [google.com]
The song from Bram's website is appropriate
https://moolenaar.net/bright.h... [moolenaar.net]
Re: (Score:2)
"Please God, Brahma, Set, don't let Redhat take over this project."
You'd rather Microsoft took it over?
RIP Bram (Score:4, Interesting)
:%s/Aug 3/Vim appreciation day/gc
His binary may be frozen, but his API lives on (Score:5, Funny)
Leave ZZ for Respects (Score:3)
ZZ
Re:Leave ZZ for Respects (Score:5, Funny)
:wq
Re: (Score:2)
I guess he finally figured out how to exit ... (Score:3)
Unlike most of the users of his software.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure I'm not the only one leaves :wq in documents when I have the misfortune to be using and editor that does not support mode editing and VI key bindings.
Fortunately many modern editors can enable VI mode these days. Including Visual Studio Code.
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The IdeaVim plugin keeps me sane at work when I "have" to use an IDE due to the complexity of the software. I'm never going to stop using Vim modes/plugins as long as they are available.
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If you can't figure out how to use the software, then you don't need to be using it.
Re: (Score:2)
[ESC]ZZ
Very sad news (Score:3)
You will be missed, Bram, RIP. Your legacy lives on and continues to be transformative for very many software engineers.
Thank you, Bram (Score:2)
:q! (Score:3)
That's sad (Score:2)
And God looked down and typed: (Score:3)
[ESC]:wq
Re: And God looked down and typed: (Score:1)
Re: And God looked down and typed: (Score:1)
muscle memory (Score:2)
Too young. (Score:2)
Courage to those who were closest to Mr. Moolenaar and condolences for their loss.
Vim is the best editor there is, and Mr. Moolenaar is the one who made it so.
So... (Score:2)
Does this mean that EMACS won?
RIP (Score:1)
how do I pull up the help page again? (Score:2)
I guess after all those years he finally figured out how to exit
Reflections upon my association with Bram Moolenaa (Score:5, Interesting)
My association with Bram started in July 1993, when I first began looking for a clone of the “vi” editor that would work on the new Linux operation system. I discovered Vim-1.27 as a collection of shell archives on the comp.editors newsgroup and found it to be much better than anything else available, particularly Elvis, a bare-bones vi clone originally included in the first Linux distribution, Slackware, created by Patrick Volkerding.
Upon discovering how good Vim was, I took two actions: (1) I started communicating with Bram to improve Vim and informing him of bugs I encountered; (2) I repackaged Vim from the shell archives it used for distribution into a compressed tar file (the new standard for software packaging) and uploaded it to the new SunSITE archive for Unix-compatible software that served as the place where Linux-compatible software was being collected.
At some point, Slackware replaced Elvis with Vim. I don’t recall whether that was because of any recommendation I made to Volkerding or just because he discovered it on SunSITE. From then on, Vim became the de facto vi editor in Linux distributions going forward. When Bram asked for volunteers to help take care of distributing releases of Vim to various ftp sites, I volunteered to be the one to distribute new releases to the Linux archives.
In early 1996, dissatisfied with the very rudimentary functionality of the ctags utility (from emacs) included in the Linux distributions, I decided I was going to create something better. To get me started, I began with the ctags program packaged with Elvis (always better to start from working code), then took a jackhammer to it and produced the initial release of Exuberant Ctags. Bram agreed to include my ctags in the Vim distribution, much as emacs and Elvis both included their own ctags utilities.
A couple of years later, Red Hat decided to replace its former ctags program with Exuberant Ctags, which led to it becoming the de facto standard ctags program in Linux distributions going forward.
I worked out with Bram and the authors of several other authors of editor programs a backwards-compatible extension to the ctags file format that would encode additional information about the tags to assist their selection in code with multiple matches to a given tag.
After 10 years, or so, Bram thought it was time that Exuberant Ctags move out from being packaged with Vim because Bram liked the idea of the entire release of Vim fitting onto a single floppy disk and, as both Vim and Exuberant Ctags had grown, this was no longer possible.
In reviewing my association with Bram, I noted my email archive shows over 700 messages we exchanged over the course of 13 years or so. Bram was always pleasant to interact with and tolerant of my sometimes harsh and blunt tone (self-awareness only comes slowly). I also was touched by his story of his connection to the children of Uganda. I am grateful to have known Bram and worked together with him. His creation was a mainstay of my professional and private life for three decades. I still use Vim to this day.
Been 24 years since I've seen him (Score:2)
I'll miss him.
Vim, Probably Until I Die (Score:2)
Have used Vim from my first year at uni on a green-text Unix terminal, where as a student not paying attention I couldn't figure out how to type any code let alone exit.
Now I seem to be a moderately advanced user and other editors frustrate me. I use the VsVim extension in Visual Studio and only recently stopped wearing my Vim polos as being too tatty to show in the office even for a dev. As a small honour, this post was written in GVim before pasting into the browser.
Thanks Bram, what a wonderful legacy.