The state of Vim [LWN.net]

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2025-01-11 12:00:05

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.

Brabandt began with his history with Vim: he has been involved in Vim since 2006, and said his first commit to the project was made in the 7.0/7.1 days (sometime around 2006). He started by contributing small patches and fixes, and then contributed larger features such as the gn and gN commands, which combine searching and visual-mode selection, improved cryptographic support using libsodium, maintained the Vim AppImage, and more. He said he became less active in the project around 2022 due to personal and work-related reasons.

That changed in August 2023, when Moolenaar passed away. Moolenaar had been the maintainer of Vim for more than 30 years; while he had added Brabandt and Ken Takata as co-maintainers of Vim in the years before, most development still flowed through him. With his death, a considerable amount of knowledge was lost—but Brabandt and others stepped up to keep the project alive.