Bram Moolenaar, the creator of the widely respected Vim code editor, has passed away at the age of 62. The family announced his passing in a heartfelt Google Groups message on August 5, revealing a sudden progression of a medical condition that had afflicted him.
Calling it a code editor is like calling my car a “work transport vehicle”
Vim is an all purpose text-editing machine and although it has some definite quirks it solves problems. If you’ve used original vi you’ll know just how much more amazing vim is without changing the core concepts.
Much love to Bram, you made the world a better place ❤️
Vim is just way better than Vi if I have to use it to actually change more than a few characters in a text file/config.
It’s probably just me but with Vi I struggle with inputting any text because I’m used to using the arrow keys to navigate. It keeps putting a ‘B’, in particular, and newlines whenever I want to navigate text.
I used to use arrow keys with VIM, but found that using hjkl worked better in some circumstances. Especially when writing reusable macros. It also avoids the need to move your fingers away from the main keys, making you faster.
I highly recommend getting use to using hjkl rather than the arrow keys.
Man, I’m sad 😔.
I knew him personally (we worked for the same company at a point in time, although very different departments). I’m also a heavy vim user.
We once were in the same meeting where the unsuspecting meeting chair was taking nodes in emacs org-mode. Most of other meeting members were not geeks, so nobody knew who Bram was. I said “Bram, look at this, they’re taking notes in emacs just to piss you off”, to which he responded “yeah, and it is horrible…” 😁
Farewell and :wq
Unfortunately, I only had limited interactions with him. I was the lead on a project that needed a few things from his team, and we had a number of meetings due to that.
From my limited contact, he seemed like a chill guy. Never made any unreasonable assumptions and had a technical view on how to solve problems.
He advertised his charity on every release, I’m sure they’d appreciate donations in his honor.
I am a young developer, NeoVim is my choice for every type of text editing. Vim is an amazing tool on par with many of the greatest software products in existence.
This man’s legacy will be honored. :wq
For those that want to pay tribute to Bram, I suggest donating to ICCF, which is the charity that has also been mentioned in Vim’s splash screen since the very beginning (see also: :help iccf in Vim/Neovim). I’m kinda embarrassed that I never got around to it before — I’ve been using Vim/Neovim for more than two decades!
