Ah, damn. I've seen this guy's name almost every day for my entire career, every time I open Vim to jot down some notes. Reading his website about his financial support and visits to Uganda was one of my very first introductions to the open source software community as a teen in the mid-2000s, back when I was still using Windows. RIP, Bram.
I had the privilege of interacting with Bram a few times through Github and he was always fast, thoughtful, and pragmatic. I know others who would say the same thing. His software will always be one of my favorites of all time.
I always appreciated his charity work. Seeing that banner on vim was the first time I realized that I could apply my coding skills and turn around and give money to charity and have a real impact in the world.
What I think we really take for granted in CS is that, unlike most other fields, the very people who invented all of this stuff are still around and you can send them an email. It seems like we've come so far, yet we are still among the very first generation of software developers ever.
My prayers for this man who has a big impact in my life. vim was my daily tool in my 15+ years of software development over various operating systems and environments.
I remember my first experience with vim, back when I was trying out Linux for the first time in the 90s as a teenager. "What is vim? How do I even exit out of this thing? Who would even use this?"
Now it's "This code editor doesn't have vim keybindings? Uninstall..."
He was the BDFL of the project with some ahem quirky architectural choices which is why the neovim project was to founded to begin with. He also did some odd stuff like rewriting everyone's commits with his own account. So I'm not sure direct hand off is going to be as easy as "its open source".
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to obtuse here, but did he take some secret knowledge with him to the grave or something? Can others not figure out the code? I can understand it may be quirky, but is the future of vim really in peril?
There are a few people who have been involved in Vim’s development. You can read a discussion here about how Bram used to handle patches and how to move forward without him:
I hope so; modal editing is an evolutionary dead end designed for Lear Siegler ADM-3As that had half the keys modern keyboards do and which had arrows printed on the HJKL keys for some reason: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Adm3aima...
Huge thread last week with lots of tributes and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324