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...
