Bram Moolenaar has died | Hacker News Reader

Bram Moolenaar has died

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Personal Anecdote:

When I was first getting started in software I was very much part of the "I can think faster than I type" school and I had the good fortune to fall in with some really serious hackers, one of whom was an absolute wizard with `vim`.

He was a very humble guy, so it was some time before I learned he was in no small part such a `vi` pro because he had written a real vi, it was called `xvi` and I gather that it was around the time that `vim` was taking off.

I asked him why he used `vim` if he had written `xvi` and I'll never forget his reply: "Writing a `vi` is something any programmer can do if they put the effort in, writing a `vi` as good as `vim` is something only people like Bram can do. Obviously I'm going to use the better tool."

Bram changed the lives and careers of so many of us, myself included. I never interacted with him personally but from everything I've ever seen he was humble, brilliant, helpful, and took his craft as seriously as anyone I've ever heard of.

RIP Legend.

https://martinwguy.github.io/xvi/

> Bram changed the lives and careers of so many of us

True.

> [...] he was humble, brilliant, helpful, and took his craft as seriously as anyone I've ever heard of

I start to think that this is not a coincidence. These excellent people, the "brilliant, but humble" ones are the ones that changed my (and possibly others') lives and careers.

Mr Moolenaar, many other FOSS devs (maintainers), university professors (I'm sure I'm not the only lucky one who experienced this), all the real silent "rock stars".

My personal theory is that "humble" people are more open to ideas and collaboration with others.

I've seen too many people with big egos who stagnate as developers. They were the top of their class in school and were used to being the "smartest" in the room. When they start working, they often make a toxic work environment and can be a huge negative impact. Unfortunately their confidence makes them more appealing to the management and many are promoted to positions where they have even less reasons to listen to others "below them" and eventually stop improving

Those that are humble and eager to learn and work with others are a huge boost to the team. The mythical 10x programmer may not exist, but a single individual can certainly make a 10x team.

This message, whether in the context of Bram Moolenaar or not, rings a bell. Academic education does not necessarily give credit to the humble and the team players. The top folks from school are not necessarily doing impactful things later in life.

I evaluated a bunch of vi clones in around 1994 and went with Vim. Xvi was one of them, as well as Elvis and some others. Already, Vim was a cut above the rest with some nice features.

It's weird, his last message was in December 2022:

""" Happy New Year to all Vim users!

I have updated the handy desktop calendar for 2023. It prints on one sheet of paper and, after folding and applying a bit of glue, stands on your desk.

It is available in English and Dutch. You can find the PDF files on my website: https://moolenaar.net/#Calendar

Happy Vimming!

-- No man may purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife. [real standing law in Pennsylvania, United States of America] """

RIP Bram. Rest assured that us Vim users will be happy Vimming while being sad that you are gone.

Personal anecdote: I had lived and worked in southern Uganda with a Canadian organization called Kibaale Children’s Fund (now Kuwasha). One day Bram came by our location. We talked a bit - someone told me he was influential and “worked for google or something” and then I learned his real identity and the software he was a part of. I was just on the brink of beginning a career in IT at the time and later in life as my skills and toolset grew I realized his significance. He never spoke of VIM in person during our time and was an incredibly humble quiet man, dedicating his time to helping children in need through ICCF Holland, which operated out of the same school I was working with as I recall. I found Bram incredibly genuine, and was also highly impressed with the ethics he brought to his efforts in the local work in Uganda (where it is typical to see fundraising dollars sliced and diced with admin-fees - ICCF turned every cent of a dollar back into the community.) He will be missed by many in that part of the world for such a massive impact he was able to have through funds raised through VIM. May he rest in peace.

> in Uganda (where it is typical to see fundraising dollars sliced and diced with admin-fees - ICCF turned every cent of a dollar back into the community.)

That’s very good to hear. I donated, but not very much – I assumed that their money would end up going to the wrong places. How did Bram manage to avoid this?

I shouldn’t speak for Bram or ICCF but can point you to the financial docs which give a great explanation https://iccf-holland.org/iccf.html

From KCFs perspective where I worked, during my time there, I fundraised my salary (expenses) personally “door to door” to keep any funds donated to the organization going direct to the kids and community. I understood this was the case for others as well. I believe Bram paid for flights out of his own pocket.

> I assumed that their money would end up going to the wrong places. How did Bram manage to avoid this?

From the LICENSE (https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/uganda.html#license):

> Compared with other organizations that do child sponsorship the amounts are very low. This is because the money goes directly to the centre. Less than 5% is used for administration. This is possible because this is a small organization that works with volunteers. [...]

> How do you know that the money will be spent right? First of all you have my personal guarantee as the author of Vim. I trust the people that are working at the centre, I know them personally. Further more, the centre has been co-sponsored and inspected by World Vision, Save the Children Fund and is now under the supervision of Pacific Academy Outreach Society. The centre is visited about once a year to check the progress (at our own cost). I have visited the centre myself many times, starting in 1993. The visit reports are on the ICCF web site.

Went to his website. There was an interview of him from 2022. The answer that really stroke me was not about Vim, but about software craftmanship vs professional programming:

« I have been working for a company where quite a few managers, educated in physics and mechanics, thought the software was just the same as what they knew and they could decide how to make it. That company went downhill and was eventually taken over. The same happens in places where decision-makers can get away with failure, such as in government. The people writing the code probably just make sure they get paid and then run away from the crime scene. On the other end of the scale are people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do or what the budget was. Somewhere in between, there is a balance. »

I am not so sure about the last sentence. But the rest is SO true!

> people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do

There was a funny React framework a while back that has all kinds of cool state management and this and that, but it renders nothing. For the developers who spend more time theorizing, migrating, refactoring, than shipping.

It's funny when people go back and forth about the time complexity of a click handler (that is debounced anyway), and they arrive at the optimal solution, but when you use the app the entire thing is super clunky lol where is the concern for time complexity of me using the product xD

I feel it's much more common to create abstractions without regard for performance cost of the abstraction. So keeping time complexity down, even for a piece that doesn't matter much, is above average for this sort of thing.

Creating abstractions without considering performance is probably the correct approach. It’s much better to at least start with a program with enough abstraction to allow reasoning about how things should work. Save performance concerns for when optimization is seen to be necessary.

This is how you wind up with fundamentally slow systems that can’t be easily sped up. You need to take some account of performance in systems design. Just don’t micro-optimize too soon.

Hard disagree. Abstractions are nice when they match the mental model of a problem domain, but the odds you have the right set of abstract primitives in mind from the outset is practically 0.

This is why TDD is not good when starting from scratch.

Your abstractions might change in a way that they break your tests in a major way, and not only do you end up re-writing a great part of your code but also of your test set.

Property based testing might be helpful for some of that.

The stupid thing in TDD is that when you refactor while keeping tests working, many of them turn into duds: tests that are not testing any corner case.

Suppose you use TDD to write a function that adds positive integer together. You get it working for add(0, 0), and nothing else. Then add(0, 1), and add(1, 0) and so on. So you have all these cases. The function is just switching on combinations of inputs, branching to a case, and returning a literal constant for that case.

After writing a few hundred of these cases you say, to hell with this nonsense, and refactor the function to actually add the f.f.fine numbers together.

Now you have two, maybe three problems:

1. Almost all the tests still pass, but most of them are uselessly uninformative.

2. Almost all, because you made a typo in the add(13, 13) test case such that it required the answer 28 to pass, and that's what you did in the code; the real code correctly puts out 26, requiring the test to be fixed.

2. The function adds together combinations that are not tested, just fine, but you can no longer have the function fail for hitherto untested inputs, and then make the test pass. You can no longer "do the TDD thing" on it.

TDD is just a crutch that has to fall out the way when a developer with two brain cells together implements a general algorithm that makes all possible inputs work.

At the same time, that crutch is pretty good for systems that fundamentally are just collections of oddball cases that won't generalize. As a rule of thumb, if there is no obvious way to refactor the code, then TDD is likely continuing to provide value in the sense that the tests are protecting important properties in what has been implemented, against breakage.

Unit test driven development is not good at this. Integration test driven development works pretty well though.

This is how we get software that run ten times slower consumes ten times more resources and this happens on occasion when software works, more often it doesn't.

Big-O notation lets you conveniently ignore constant factors like 'ten times'.

(I'm only half joking. A system that's always ten times slower than the optimal solution, can still be beneficial to one that's quadratically slower than the optimal solution. Or it can be worse, it depends on how big your instances are.)

Also creating abstractions without considering the mental overhead of reasoning about what the code is doing.

Not enterprise: event --> action.

Enterprise: event --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_parta --> abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_partb abstraction --> abstraction --> abstraction --> action_finalizer.

I sometimes wonder if people believe that enterprise devs create abstractions for "fun" without having any rational reason.

A paycheck and a re-org are pretty rational reasons. Maybe they aren’t the ones that create concise software but they can certainly be the ones taken en masse.

In my experience enterprise devs don't really like what they are having to create either. They feel boxed into it because of all the petty rules that large organisations create.

No, but they often do it out of cargo culting (sometimes by the individual dev, sometimes by the bureaucratic conmittee of ex-enterprise-coders and managers-who-have-read-about-coding that adopted the mandatory coding standards) without any rational reason.

Source: seeing it from the inside.

Re-frame?

This was immediately what I thought of, too.

> people go back and forth about the time complexity of a click handler (that is debounced anyway)

This is the modern software world in a nutshell.

What's wrong with the last sentence?

For ease of consumption, the context again:

> On the other end of the scale are people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do or what the budget was. Somewhere in between, there is a balance.

It’s remarkably uncommon to find an employee who strikes a balance between the two. But I think this doesn’t make the sentence wrong.

Literally everyone strikes the balance. According to their experience. The older, the more experienced, the more balanced.

There's a difference in the balance that people like to do, and what's best for the organization. I definitely can't deny that I've sometimes gone for the side that made my job better for me, but not necessarily helped the organization the most.

The problem is corporate interests usually demand expedience and individual, short-term output while dismissing any notion of craftsmanship, completeness, correctness, or long-term investment. More and more corporations have completely stopped investing in employee education, career, and professional development apart from harassment and privacy training videos.

I'll go with: the sentence takes this as a dimension, this at one end, that at the other. While perhaps what matters is on an entirely different dimension. From a point of view of usefulness to its users, is there a strong correlation with whether the project was "thrown over the fence" or is a work of software artistry?

After reading all the comments, I realise I misinterpretated the last two sentences. I thought Bram was concluding that you have to accept the same kind of trade-off you accept in the frame of professional software development, when you deliver an app you are really dedicated to.

Obviously, Bram, or Linus, or Stallman, and many other devs I don’t even know, are not there for delivering half-baked pieces of art. And that’s eventually a GOOD thing. [the counterpart being that the dedication level is MUCH beyond the one in professional environments]

I understand wanting to write beautiful code, it's a major motivator for me. But it does have to actually do something useful - or there's no point.

The code itself, its elegance and cleverness can be a point in itself. I'd argue it's a stupid point (with a few exceptions ala CCC), but for some people it does seem to be the main driver.

But that's the whole point, isn't it?

I've worked with enough "professional" programmers to know I don't want to work with them and their sloppy, reckless, uncurious, and inconsiderate ways.

So what do you do for a living?

Well from your low karma, I know you're a troll.

They have 1.0303 points for every comment compared to your 1.0407. That's not a difference to be boasting about. What you might want to criticize instead is how young their account is (first comment was mid June).

So you're a moralizing stalker. Do you work in law enforcement or have a need to control people? Or is this your other account?

> So you're a moralizing stalker.

Do you think I went through and counted everything? No, the app I use just tells me the total points and comment count for users. Does that really make me a stalker?

> Do you work in law enforcement or have a need to control people?

What an utter waste of words.

> Or is this your other account?

Not quite sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you accusing me being the other guy's alt? What would the point of that even be?

The last sentence was the point. Either end of the spectrum are people who are not caring about the right things (typically about themselves, egos, etc).

I'm pretty sure that company was Océ, I worked there at the same time Bram was there (although I don't think I ever met him).

They were a photocopier company that struggled with technology in general, not just software. I suspect the root of their problem was that they had been taken over by sales and marketing people. That's never good for a technology company.

As a long time Vim user I’m extremely thankful for Bram’s creation and stewardship of an incredible piece of software. He gave the world an amazing gift.

I’ve interacted with Bram a few times personally in the process of submitting changes to Vim, and I’ve observed many more interactions with others. I always had an immense amount of respect for the way he led the Vim project and interacted with the community. It is not uncommon to see open source software maintainers become burnt out or frustrated, particularly with a piece of software as quirky and complicated as Vim. But Bram was almost always respectful and patient with users and contributors, even when they were not.

This is a loss for the software world. Bram, you will be missed.

Thanks for sharing!

I had an opportunity to talk to the Bram Moolenaar when VimConf 2018 was held in Japan. First and only time Bram visited Japan.

I was there as a volunteer staff, sitting at a reception desk. Although vim is the text editor I use everyday, I'm not that enthusiastic to participate the vim conference. I'm not a vim developer. I don't use some of the advanced vim features. I don't ask much for a text editor. I use vim simply because it's available in all environments I could possibly use. I was a volunteer staff because I was asked by one of my colleague at that time who was a serious vim user and organized the VimConf.

So I didn't have a plan to talk to Bram at all. There were so many Japanese vim developers and serious vim users there who want to talk to Bram. This may be the first and last chance to talk to Bram in person for them. I don't want to waste the precious time for them.

Then, I learned at the conference that recent vim release includes termdebug plugin which allows vim to behave as a gdb frontend. Since I am a C++ programmer, I started playing with it. Then, I quickly found a bug. termdebug assume there's only one function for a name and couldn't handle C++ function overloading.

I discussed this issue with Bram Moolenaar in a spare time.

There aren't many other things I can tell about Bram.

At the after party of VimConf 2018, Bram absolutely refused to use a cup and drink beer directly from a beer bottle. It wasn't a small 333 ml beer bottle. It was a big 633 ml beer bottle.

Before the VimConf 2018, Bram went to climb Mt. Fuji during his stay in Japan.

Here is photos from Bram when they were at the Japan trip: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMc4NF8j66ohinWutVHktl4... "Tokyo 2018 (Nov 17 – 25, 2018)"

His website has a lot of other albums he published for everyone to enjoy: https://moolenaar.net/albums.html

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BtVZMoZjdEmPKCeu9

This photo remembers me a funny discussion at that time.

One of the participants said he use vim to write .emacs file.

"Why don't you use Emacs for that?" I asked.

"Because if I have to edit .emacs, that means emacs isn't configured the way I liked it. So I use vim in that case"

Wow these are really great photos - I'm sure both due to most culture in Japan is dripping in beauty, but also because Bram just takes really good photos!

Thank you for sharing.

Though while I'm on Bram's team in the editor wars, it seems like we chose different sides in the camera wars. RIP and thanks for the program I probably use the most. :x

I am such a huge fan of Vim that I ran a Vim blog and posted daily tips for several years (will not mention it by name because I do not want to self-promote in this thread). I don't have much to say besides the fact that I feel like we've lost a "giant" in the open source world, and Bram's contributions as a software engineer, and more importantly, a fantastic human being, will not be forgotten. :help uganda

I’ll do it for you, I’d be interested in reading that blog.

Could mention the site in profile btw. Afaik it's common/good practice to have some sort of way to get to a contact method in one's profile

Thanks, added.

Few people could probably argue that they helped as many humans in dire situations like Bram did in his life. Vim was the first time I came across "charityware" as vim encourages users to donate to International Child Care Fund Holland on its splash screen, instead of begging for money for itself. I feel a bit of shame when I say that I've only donated to ICCF once over all these years....

As a remembrance of Bram and to thank him for building the editor I've been using for as long as I can remember, I'm doing exactly what he would have wanted me to do, donating to ICCF Holland. If you're a vim/nvim/other edition user, I suggest you to do the same: https://iccf-holland.org/donate.html

If you're a (neo)vim user, there is more information at `:help iccf` as well.

Thank you Bram for everything. I'm sure your spirit and lines written will stay with me and others for a very long time in the future.

Few contribute so meaningfully to the world through software as Bram did. I donated an amount as if I were purchasing vim as an expensive commercial text editor.

For most death announcements on HN, I have to look up who they were. Not this one. I greatly appreciate his work and contributions to the world.

For everyone reading this who has ever adored vim, or any of the editors that would go on to be inspired by vim, I can think of no better tribute to Bram than to make a donation to the charity that he spent the better part of his life advocating for.

Thanks for bringing this up! It was a good reminder for me to donate. May he rest in peace.

Bram had been spending over 30 years on Vim; and not just "the occasional patch/bugfix", but significant amounts, and almost every single day for some years.

The number of people who spent that much time working on Open Source is very small, and the number of people who have spent that much time purely in their spare time is smaller still. In fact, I don't really know of anyone who even comes close to Bram.

The number of people who spent this much time volunteering for anything is very small.

Bram's effort on Vim was phenomenal and exceptional by any standard.

---

I only met Bram in person once, in 2014, when he talked about Zimbu[1]; at some point I must have given a bit of a skeptical look, and he promptly looked at me and asked "oh, you don't agree? Why not?" It was a nice talk with lots of "audience engagement" like this. We spent some time talking during the rest of the day and the next day; we discussed and joked about lots of things; I don't recall talking much about Vim: it just didn't come up. I found him a very friendly, warm, and likeable person.

Sven Guckes (who passed away last year) did organize a little "Ask Me Anything" type workshop with Bram, and I discovered Bram struggled remembering the ins-and-outs of some of the lesser used Vim features just as much as the rest of us :-)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O-QdG2X1Lw)

> and the number of people who have spent that much time purely in their spare time (i.e. not as part of their job, like Torvalds or van Rossum) is smaller still.

I agree, but the fact that there's a non-zero amount of people doing it shouldn't be overlooked. For example maintainer of qutebrowser (who also happen to be in pytest core team) and apart from a teaching job at an university a couple of months per year, he's working full time on OSS. The main characteristics they share (at least those I met) seem to be a deep love for the craft, a deep love for people, and be virtually unfazed by the amount of money they can make if they weren't doing that.

I don't know if Bram's family has this thread or is reading it, but the extent to which his work has impacted the software development community is enormous.

Vim was one of the first pieces of software I learned when I switched to Linux in college. It was tricky at first, then it delighted me to no end. It remains a daily part of my life nearly 20 years later, and I'm still learning more about it every single year.

I can't count the number of times I wish I could drop out of insert mode in normal web browser text boxes.

Bram's insistence of donating his earnings to helping the children of Uganda is also incredibly selfless, and it's impossible to mention him without bringing this up [1].

We'll miss you Bram. We'll be learning from you for decades to come.

[1] https://www.vim.org/sponsor/faq.php

readline vi mode, vimperator and pentadactyle are a testimony

> I can't count the number of times I wish I could drop out of insert mode in normal web browser text boxes.

You can, if you really want to:

https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim

Thanks for posting the donation link and the reminder, I've made a donation as well.

Vim has shaped so many aspects of my professional life; I'll forever be grateful to Bram for his work and contributions. Rest in peace, Bram.

The news made me unexpectedly said. There are not many people that felt so close without ever knowing them, just because I used their software. Thank you for the reminder to donate: the least thing one can do now. I think most of the digital stuff I ever produced in my life was using vim. Software, scripts, websites, theses, a book, I actually even used a plugin to fill out text boxes in the web using vim.

All the stray 'i's in documents or source code in stuff I had to write with other editors give evidence to my dedication. Thank you Bram! May you live forever in vim.

This is a great idea. Bram has made a huge positive impact on the world, even if most people aren't aware of it. I'd love to help make it even bigger.

Edit: Hmm... PayPal seems to throw error after error at me when I try to donate. I'll keep trying.

Yay, PayPal let me through. I just had to turn off uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger... But for Bram, I'm ok with it.

Thanks for the link, should have made a donation years and years ago. Better late than never, I suppose.

I wrote on twitter that vim is a masterpiece. It's the gleaming precise machine tool on which so much of modernity was crafted. It's so hard to quantify Bram's impact, because he did so much through so powerful a force multiplier.

I started as a Unix sysadmin 25 years ago and kept gravitating towards vim. One practical reason is because it paid off to be familiar with vi, which is nearly always still available on just-installed or bare-bones systems. But another is how welcoming and leveling the Vim community was. It was so easy to get great macros and tips, and everyone was just super friendly about it. I remember someone in #vim irc teaching me "gqap" to wrap a paragraph, and they very naturally took the time to explain how it all worked. There was no sneering on from the community. I think Bram's empathy and leadership was a huge part of that attitude in the community.

I'm a regular annual donor on Vim's behalf, and this morning donated another €250 in Bram's memory. People should only donate what they can afford, we all have different means, but I'd encourage folks to work out what a great commercial editor or IDE would have cost them in licensing over their use time, and to consider donating in proportion.

:wq Bram

Since there's a ton of Google employees here - reminder that Google does gift matching for this charity!

Who knows why there's no financial statement for 2022? 2021 is on the home page. https://iccf-holland.org/iccf.html

It looks like Bram was the treasurer, so his medical condition could potentially have something to do with it.

> "I'm doing exactly what he would have wanted me to do, donating to ICCF Holland. If you're a vim/nvim/other edition user, I suggest you to do the same: https://iccf-holland.org/donate.html ."

In view of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-ki...

I'm calling out that I have donated.

I have donated a few times and always got a personal email from Bram in thanks. These were not large amounts by any means.

Rest in Peace, Bram.

I met Bram once, at an open source fair at Google’s Zürich office. At the fair everybody could show off their projects. There was one person who had built some kind of AST editor/IDE, where the unit of editing was not the file, but functions floating around in a workspace. He was showing this to Bram, but I don’t think he realized who he was talking to. When he asked “so, what do you think?”, Bram answered “Hmm yeah, I’m more of a vi-type of person.”

That's a great anecdote!

> Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrotes 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.

Pioneered one of the most iconic pieces of software in history, and yet did not make a single dime from it. That is truly something to look up to.

For anyone interested, here is the link to the ICCF charity that I found on the Vim website.

https://iccf-holland.org/

I have made a donation in memory of Bram Moolenaar, as a token of my gratitude for having vi over the years.

He did, he only gave everything of it to ICCF then.

When I first entered this field in the 80s, there was a rivalry between vi users (as I was) and emacs users. There was so much about emacs that I couldn't stand, but I'll admit to quite a bit of envy as well.

Then, some time around 94 or so, I became aware of this vi clone called vim. My emacs envy could finally be put to rest because this vim could either do (or had on the roadmap to do) everything I had envied from looking over emacs users' shoulders! I became a rabid user and evangelist, immediately downloading each new version, reporting (and occasionally fixing) bugs. For a while when I was working at Sun in the late 90s, Bram and I had an ongoing email dialog.

My career path has never really allowed me to significantly work on open source, so I never really made the transition to a major contributor. Many years ago, vim hit peak feature set for me, so I didn't really need to track its development - the version bundled on my work desktop would always suffice and I'd download a new version at home whenever I changed out my home Windows PC. Other than that, I lost track of the community.

When I came to Google, I was tickled to find out that Bram worked here, though I never reached out to him personally. Before I knew it, he had retired, and I lost that chance.

For over 25 years, I have only ever used vim as my editor - at home or at work. It is the most dependable tool in my box, traveling with me through multiple employers and programming languages.

RIP Bram.

Wow that hits rather hard actually. I never knew him other than through the welcome message on Vim, but he made one of the tools I rely on the most in my daily life.

Thanks Bram, have a good afterlife.

I am likewise surprised by how hard this hits. I shouted out loud when I read the headline! Quite a reaction to somebody who I only ever saw one photo of and read the occasional release notes etc. Yet as a vim user, he has been part my daily activities for years.

The name Bram Moolenaar has hovered across all my work…

Thank you Mr. Moolenaar.

Yeah, relate. It shows you that with some good software, you can make an impact.

Damn… I have been using Vim for decades and never thought once about the people responsible for it. I need to be more thoughtful of this to acknowledge people’s excellent work.

Absolutely. I've written everything in Vim for almost as long as Vim has been around -- three books, dozens of talks and papers, who knows how many lines of code . . .

I had been joking on social media a few weeks ago that Vim must be "done" since patches stopped appearing about a month ago. Can't believe that the guy who created maybe the most important tool in my entire arsenal is gone.

Yes, very hard. I feel like I knew him - kind of silly given I've never met him and I don't think have even crossed emails with him. Yet I've used his work for decades and I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of him in Vim in a very real way. Wish I'd sent him a note to say thanks. GNU Bram.

It seems that behind that bare prompt and message lies a whole era where things were simpler in many dimensions. A bunch of help text, a charity suggestion, a cursor ... it was as simple as mysterious and capable.

> 8: How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

> Keep me alive.[1]

[1] 10 Questions with Vim’s creator, Bram Moolenaar (2014) https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...

Loved his "7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0" (2007) talk and humor [1]

"How many of you are mostly using Emacs?"

a bunch of raised hands

"Okay, we'll try to convert some people today!"

RIP, Bram Moolenaar

[1] - https://youtu.be/p6K4iIMlouI

A lot of this advice is about turning vim into a "modern" text editor with a language server configured.

I used to use vim but lately I switched to Helix, which is basically vim but with all the good features and plugins built into it and without a configuration/extension language. Almost all of the features are easily discoverable by just pressing spacebar, and the rest by browsing the (small) documentation, and I can think of a way to do all the things Bram talks about from within Helix, often better (because it's relying on the language server).

Still, the main point about learning your tools by detecting inefficiencies and searching for a better way is always valid, and I'm sure that all these things Vim was already doing at the time helped pave the way for modern editors. RIP.

That presentation is also available as PDF with notes from his homepage:

https://moolenaar.net/habits_2007.pdf

I want to see his .vimrc, RIP

Now this is a bit random but many years ago I run into a Dutch couple running some kind of wildlife farm in Ghana. When they found out I was geekish they said a relative of theirs was big in the open source world. Turned out to be Bram.

I can't quite remember what the relationship was but since then every time I use vim (not often admittedly ) I think of this Dutch woman looking after a jumble of wild animals in the middle of nowhere...

Bram defined the interface I've used to express myself in so many ways since my early teens. His contributions to software development reach far beyond the $EDITOR and pervasive interaction patterns we're all so familiar with.

Thoughts are with his friends and family right now. Rest in peace, Mr. Moolenaar.

Really sad to hear this... My first donation as a late teen to free software, was to the ICCF Uganda, thanks to vim's charityware license. It was maybe around 1997 or 98. Later versions of vim used a formal free software license, but still off-band encouraging donations to the ICCF. I've always been a bit skeptical to the whole concept of charity, but I respected Bram Moolenaar so much due to his work on vim that I trusted his judgement. I kept donating to the ICCF for a few years until he was hired at google.

I was also deeply honored to see my (tiny, insignificant) minority language on his page for the word Mooleenar in many languages [0].

As a matter of respect and to honour his memory, I will keep using the last version of vim (by his last commit [1]) as my main text editor for as long as humanly feasible.

[0] https://www.moolenaar.net/

[1] https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/4c0089d696b8d1d5dc40568f25...

There is a collection of people and cultural artifacts that are contemporary to us, though usually not our exact age. They pass away, one at a time, until we are all that is left of the world we once defined, a world that eventually is gone.

Bram’s passing is another chip at the passing of the world I knew, where vim was new.

Thank you Bram for your excellent and enviable contribution to computing.

I wrote the iOS port of Vim and therefore exchanged a few emails with Bram. As you can guess, a very nice person. Thank you for Vim, Bram!

Sharing a piece of advice Bram gave to me once:

"It appears you think that everybody is like you. But that's not so."

I didn't take the advice well at the time, but now, a little older and wiser, I understand.

Thank you, Bram. Thank you for vim, for your time and dedication, and for taking the time to deposit a small amount of your wisdom into my brain. Sorry for being a dick.

It's a hard piece of advice to make use of. I couldn't say whether I assume everyone is like me or not: it really depends on what we're talking about.

Are you okay with sharing what it was about concretely? That may be more of a takeaway, to learn in which way people aren't all alike, than the general statement that not everyone's the same

It was in response to some UX considerations for a feature I wanted to patch into vim. I must have had a bad week, I was needlessly combative after an initially abrasive response from another contributor who closed my issue without consideration. Bram stepped in and finally got the conversation moving.

We couldn't come to an agreement on how to implement it in the most robust way... meanwhile over at neovim a PR was submitted and merged, and a backwards-compatible solution provided within 3 days of me filing an issue. :-)

classic line. Do you think he'll be remembered for his struggles with the perils of open source feature requests, as well as for vim itself? Largley because of the keybindings, Vim was a perfect storm for this: maybe the epitaph is "he could never figure out how to quit vim either". +1 for the Moolenaar award to show appreciation for people whilst they're still alive and coping with the rest of us all being dicks....

If his epitaph isn't something along the lines of ":wq", I'd be very disappointed.

In 2000 we organized a large outdoor LAN party for a week in the middle of nowhere hosting around 600 Unix/Linux aficionados. I was very proud to have found Bram to speak there at our event. On the days ahead I became very anxious to welcome this paragon of open source contributors, but I soon found out Bram was one of the most fun and caring people I had the honour to meet. Not just did he tell us his story of developing vim, he also organised an in promptu quiz on Unix and networking. I have fond memories of Bram and am truly sad to hear he passed away. Bram truly captured the soul of open source.

I've used vim for everything going on my entire career now.

It started in my senior year as a CS student - in an operating systems course, we were introduced to a lot of linux stuff and the professor taught Vim as part of his course. At first I rebelled. I chose to develop most of my projects in eclipse/Java at that point and had developed an aversion to the command line. That, plus Vim's learning curve made me hate it at first.

Fast forward a year at my first job at an embedded systems shop writing in pure C, all the vets used vim and I saw how fast they were with it and it made me want to learn. I think my first "aha!" moment was when I accidentally entered visual mode and prepended several lines at once with a comment. After that I was hooked, and while I'm typically one of the only ones using pure vim on any team I'm on, inevitably after a year or so at the job people see how I use it and start asking about it.

Goofing around with Vim as a quiet "rebellion" to my professor demoing EMACs went much further than the joke I started it as - it became a gateway drug to me using the terminal for almost everything and understanding how computers work at a much lower level.

Thank you Bram for the work you put into Vim!

Sending heartfelt condolences to Bram's family. His last commit is just one month ago: https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/4c0089d696b8d1d5dc40568f25.... I wonder who else has access to vim.org and the official git repository and if there will be anyone step up to become vim's BDFL.

Judging by that the announcement email came from his own email, I'm guessing there has been some sort of redundancy setup done when the medical condition was initially detected.

more likely a close relative simply got access to his accounts.

I'm worried about this and feel like "vim" as actively maintained software probably also died today.

Neovim seems to be going strong. https://github.com/neovim/neovim

Neovim has a bit of a different mentality compared to Vim; it's not the same project.

I don't really want to discus this in detail here as it's not the right location, but I think lots of people would be interested in continuing Vim, rather than having Vim being subsumed by Neovim. We'll have to see how things and the relationship between Vim and Neovim change and evolve in the coming weeks and months.

I assume there are multiple people willing and able to continue vim development and I think it might be important for that to happen. I just thought it was relevant in the context of that comment to mention the other project.

Whether VIM proper withers and fades away or not, Bram's legacy will live on through Neovim too.

That's a strong assumption. There isn't an infinite amount of developers willing to sacrifice their free time for common good.

I have a weaker assumption - somebody will keep maintaining it, but active feature development is in question.

I'm still waiting for a GTK and Windows GUI as good as the one provided by vim.

OH NO!!!! This guy literally changed my life by making vim. I could not imagine coding without vim!!!

It's weird but coding in vim is going to take on a new significance now. Each keystroke, somehow saluting him.

Very sad....

I think we definitely need the black navbar of mourning.

Fuck, reading all these comments i kind of feel we should have told him before he died how much we appreciated him…. :…(

Like there should be an open source lifetime achievement award or something. Like the academy awards.

Call it the Moolenaar Award, maybe?

That thought never really occurred to me, and now I’m feeling a deep sense of regret. BM has had more impact on my career than anybody.

Such sad news! Condolences to his family, friends and thousands of admirers worldwide. One way to commemorate his life is to donate to the charityware cause he championed: https://www.iccf-holland.org

As an Emacs user [1] I can only say: RIP and thank you, for making the lives of programmers and engineers worldwide easier, with the healthy competition of Emacs and VIM approaches to text editing.

You live as long as your contribution to the world, and you can rest assured that a large part of us will still be using modal editing in our mind-controlled VR spatial googles.

:wq

1: just this morning I was trying evil-mode once again...

Bram was a great man. Vim is a great piece of software. Vim is charityware. Distributed for free, it encourages people to make donations to help children in Unganda. I used to donate some money, starting from 2010. Bram sent you a key corresponding to your donation when he received it, and you could use the key to accumulate the amount of you donations, which would give you some priority in suggesting improvements in Vim. He responded very promptly after donations were made. My last donation on 17 July 2023 did not receive his reply, and I was worried.

I am by no means a Vim master, but Vim is virtually the ONLY text editor that I have been using since 2009. I typed my Ph.D. thesis (in Chinese!) and all of my papers/code using Vim.

Bram, thank you very much for this masterpiece. Thank you for making your masterpiece charityware, which has inspired me to do the same thing with my code.

R.I.P.

Wow this came out of nowhere. :( I had no idea he was struggling with a health issue.

Some context: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/ivkq22t3LQM

> Vim is like a son to me :-).

Huge respect.

Thank you so much for everything, and rest in peace.

Bram was a a legend. So many people dying right now. Hopefully it was not the same cause that so many other people relatively young are dying from right now. Seems he was 62, not so old yet. Wondering what happened to him ?

RIP, I've spent more time in Vim than any other software for sure, still use it to edit my journals and editing single files when needed.

> the same cause

What cause is that?

It is a cause that cannot be discussed here, without getting downvoted to oblivion.

Vim and its descendant modes in other editors has drastically improved my life, which maybe is a weird thing to say about a text editor but it's true. I am very sorry to hear of his passing.

If it's something that you use for a large part of your day, then there is nothing weird about it.

I was just trying to think how to say the same thing but wasn't sure how to say it. Since first discovering Vim back in the 1990s it's been something I've used almost every working day.

It's probably my favourite piece of software. Where ever I go, whatever platform I use, whatever I write, I use Vim.

Bram's work has made my life better. This is sad news indeed. :(

The very first time in life that I reported a bug to an OSS project was to Vim, by email to Bram, when I was in high school. Thinking back from now, that was definitely not a good way to report bugs, but Bram was super helpful and responded kindly to this ignorant kid.

Thank you Bram, and RIP.

I did exactly the same thing. In fact Bram was the first "well known" developer I ever got into "contact" with. Kept his reply mail to this day. ;)

I never had the good fortune to meet him, but his work on vim has had an impact on my life every day ever since I started programming as a teenager. Seeing his name along with the "charityware" license of vim each time I create a new file had an impact on me when I first started using vim and I went to read up on this "odd fellow" using a non-standard license. I eventually stopped paying attention to it after many years of seeing the same screen every day. I didn't have money to donate when I first started using vim, but given the news I've donated to ICCF Holland in honour of his career-long effort to bring attention to the charity.

We lost a good one today. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family through this difficult time. I hope they are honoured to know that his work had an impact on so many people's lives. What an enormous loss. Rest in peace, Bram Moolenaar.

I worked with Bram at Google. He was an incredibly nice guy. He went out of his way to meet with me on a few different occasions. I wasn’t important at the time—I just made a few UI widgets for Google Calendar, which was his team at Google. Very swell guy who made the world a better place.

That's interesting; I didn't know he worked on Google Calendar and I've been a vimmer my entire career.

I learned vim as a kid in the 90s and used it my entire life. I've never used anything else. The hours it has saved me through its efficiency and productivity has probably extended my lifespan.

Vim was born out of a simple system and a deep empathy and understanding of what a developer really needs.

In every line of code, every efficient series of keystrokes, his legacy endures. May it last forever. Rest in peace.

There are extremely few people whose software transformed my life as much as Vim did. I know people would say that Vim is just an editor, but to me it rekindled the spark by giving me the direction I was looking for in this limitless world of computers. The fact that something can be so damn powerful and precise under the hood while coming across as just a blank screen with a blinking cursor changed the way I thought about software. I know this community took you for granted sometimes, but I couldn't be more thankful for this incredible piece of technology and the way you used it to give back even more to the community. Thank you, Bram.

Bram influenced me. The splash screen that encouraged donation to charity caught my attention like nothing else. Inspired by that splash screen, I started volunteering my time and donated money to many causes that I cared about.

I once had a brief interaction with Bram. He clearly said, he didn't need any money and encouraged all donations to causes he cared about. In one case, $10,000 to Kilbale children center, he volunteered with.

Omg.... his Github contribution graph made me cry so hard right now. It was like he was fading away slowly.

You'll probably get emotional as I did if you click on this: https://github.com/brammool

:'( I won't be surprised if he knew about the illness for more than a month but kept the diagnosis private decided to work until the very end.

It's so surreal to me that I can look at his commit graph on github and see he was working right up until very recently. Rest in peace.

https://github.com/brammool

That's an especially poignant view; you can see the activity start strong last year and then fade out until it just ends.

Rest in peace, Bram; thank you for your work.

Just looking at the per month commit counts, it looks like they dropped substantially from February this year compared to the past.

Looks like vim should continue!

https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/6_yWxGhB_8I/m/ibserACY...

It pains me to see that the last commit was the beginning of July.

As a huge fan of vim and now neovim (which would not exist without the amazing work of Bram and others on vim) I am saddened.

I didn't really know about him until I started reading about him in the comments to this post and wow, he seemed like a person I wish I could have known either as a friend or colleague or as a mentor or any combination thereof, seems we could all learn a bit from his example as it seems he remained cool under pressure and dedicated a lot of his time to vim the editor we all love.

Condolences to his family and friends and mates at Google.

Vim is fascinating because it revived a kind of wonky tool in vi.

I remember learning about the command line and having to use original vi. It was weird. But Bram saw some underlying genius in the tool and revived it. Not just for vim itself, but all the vims, all the tools that have vim bindings, etc.

And such a genius name too: like Vi improved, but also vim, as in vim and vigor, a fantastic word to have as your companion programming.

With things like this, you realize how short life is, and sometimes how brittle it can be. I often forget that the people that built the foundation of what we use every day are still with us, and we have a short time to be able to show them appreciation before we say thank you to someone who has gone, if you know of someone that has dedicated time to something that you use, show your appreciation this week. It might be the last time that you have the opportunity to make that human contact.

Thank you, sir. <3 vim

I discovered Vim around a decade ago when my IT career was just starting. Since having a friend walk me through how to use it, I have never stopped using it -- and it's not an exaggeration to say that I use it every day.

Vim is a piece of software that has changed my life. Rest in peace, Bram, you will be missed. Condolences to Bram's family.

I'm speechless; I never thought I would feel this sad for a person whom I've never met, not even sent a message or an email. I don't even know his face, and yet, the impact of his work on my life is so immense that it feels like sailing at night, and then the lighthouse suddenly goes dark. RIP.

Thank you for everything, Bram. vim has been my editor forever and I can’t imagine using any other.

Can we please have a black banner?

God ... this hit me like a pile of bricks. Bram has probably had one of the biggest impacts on development out of basically anyone. I mean not just Vim, which was genius in its own right, but his work with the ICCF and the concept of charity-ware. My deepest condolences to his family. Anybody set up a HN donation drive for ICCF Holland?

Wow really really sad news.

When I was first starting to learn vim I thought to myself who would go through all these troubles just to write some text on an editor when there are better alternatives out there but then I slowly started to understand how it really worked and how you can slowly craft it to your liking. Now, I spend almost 90% of my time in terminal and vim and can't see myself working without it.

Thank you Bram for playing a big part of my coding life through your contributions.

Wow ;_; when I see our legends pass like this (you feel like they will live forever), it reminds me how short of a time we have here. Condolences to family and friends, he was truly exceptional in life. :wq

I met Bram in the Google Mountain View office. We chatted for over two hours. He was full of humility and curiosity and more interested in what I was working on (I was working on DistBelief back then). Hats off to a life full of impact and a legacy that will continue to impact programmers all over the world. RIP.

In the initial sponsorship for Neovim some people asked why none of us sponsored Vim. So I went to give an equal amount there and found that he wanted it to go charity.

That was the first time I'd encountered charityware. Mind blowing tool, vim, and I am very impressed by him.

A legend of the field.

Even if I use neovim (some great plugins) there are better modals out there now (helix is cool but I hate some of the differences from Vim) Vim is the editor.

Vim is how I type. Vim is how I code. Vim is how I think.

Made a donation to ICCF in Bram's honour today. It will not be the last.

As a former colleague, I remember one funny interaction with him. I was sitting in the same desk but on a different floor. One sleepy morning I tried to oust him from his desk and once I recognized him we ended up chatting few minutes about open source at Google and his involvement. Great person and as a Vim user forever grateful for his efforts.

I lived in Adliswil, a couple streets away from him. When I learned about the fact that this Legend lives just nearby, I was like a child before Christmas, planning to meet up with him and thanking him for vim.

I never did. I hope I would have. :-(

RIP, mr Moolenar.

:q

I'm very sad to read this. I first downloaded vim from a public FTP server in the early 90s on my Amiga computer. My love-hate-love relationship with the editor has followed the arc of my own decades-long hacking adventure. When neovim came out, I stuck with vim out of loyalty and nostalgia, not due to any technical merits -- which was very out-of-character for me. I guess I finally have a good reason to swtich.

RIP Bram.

Still to this day when I start my daily vim session I see his personal message to donate to the children of Uganda. I've been seeing this message for well over 20 years, my entire career for sure. What an impact to have on IT, and on the world. You're forever remembered Bram.

I've read a lot of obituaries on this forum, but this is the first one that affected me on a personal level. I've been using vim for 15+ years now, and probably never gone more than a week without it.

RIP Bram. Thank you for making our daily lives that much more enjoyable.

Such a loss. I've spent many hours reading vim's incredible source code and documentation while developing a vim emulation plugin for the Julia REPL. Absolute world class codebase.

Moolenaar was an amazing programmer, and his impact will be long lasting. May he rest in peace.

For me, Bram is probably among names like Tarkovsky, Stravinsky and Attenborough, who greatly affected the way I see/feel life. R.I.P.

Vim improved and changed my life for the better more than any software except Linux itself. I'll probably use vim (or an editor inspired by it) for the rest of my life; it's Way of editing text changes everything.

Rest in peace, Bram.

It didn’t occur to me until now that vim is perhaps the oldest tool I’ve used continuously since the early days of my education and career. And I don’t just use it, I use it every single day and have for probably 30 years.

Thank you Bram.

I don't remember when I found vim or how, but I emailed myself the vim book download link 19 years ago[1]. I've installed it at work on my Windows machines, tried to convince coworkers to use it, enthused about it online, played https://www.vimgolf.com/ , answered a few vim questions on Stack Exchange sites, and recognised Bram Moolenaar's name for years from the splash screen.

RIP.

[1] http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/doc/book/vimbook-OPL.pdf

[ There are only three names which have been deeply burned into my memory from splash screens; Bram Moolenaar from Vim, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi from Gravity Wars which I played as a kid https://archive.org/details/GravityWars_1020 ( https://ia802805.us.archive.org/16/items/5_Plus_One_-_Gunshi... )) and H. Peter Anvin from Linux boot screen / SYSLINUX https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3emX.jpg ]

Pioneered one of the most iconic pieces of software in history, and yet did not make a single dime from it. That is truly something to look up to.

Bram was an inspiration, not just for developing vim, which so many of we programmers used to get into a flow state programming. But also for his work on charity. Deserving of the black banner!

So sad, I had the honor to meet Bram at a FOSS talk with RMS which he organized in Amsterdam RAI. I'll never forget that day. I've been using VIM for a many decades and I'm sure to keep using it for a long time. Many thanks for all the work and condolences for his family.

Vim has completely changed the way I use computers and I'm not able to thank Bram enough for this. Even though I have switched to Neovim and never met him, it makes me deeply sad. :wq

I was first introduced to Vim from a Jeffrey Way tutorial about HTML5 way back in 2010 or maybe 2008 when first learning about programming. Ever since then I've used Vim throughout my career, even somehow convincing others to use it too. I've been using neovim for the last 5 years but can still hop on a colleagues machine or into a server and still be productive.

Easily the most important piece of software I've ever used in my life, since it has allowed me to make a living.

RIP Bram Moolenaar.

Bram was really important for me. I remember the joy of learning how to use vim and how easy it was to bond with other fellow users.

Who would imagine a text editor could instill such a strong sense of identity into its users?

The first time I’ve been to SF I even got a “:w” tattooed on me.

Bram, you will be missed.

I was looking for a post like this because I couldn’t agree more. While I didn’t get a tattoo like you , I can’t imagine living without a tool that is one of the most important to my livelihood.

Should you want to donate, if you have the Benevity giving platform through your employer then you may be able to double any donation through that:

"Stichting ICCF Holland"

Is the name I search for.

RIP, a great guy, a public benefactor and a great coder.

I think the black stripe should be on HN today; it's quite justified.

I've spent most of my schooling and career using Vim in one form or another. It's as close to an instrument that I don't even need to think about using and can just follow muscle memory as anything I've ever worked with.

It's perhaps my most important tool as an engineer. So much of its design is clear as the brainchild of Bram, so hearing this makes me sad. I hope Bram knew how many lives he touched.

No piece of software has influenced my career and my thinking on design, user interfaces, and software quality as much as VIM. VIM made learning to code as fun as playing a game. Thank you Bram, you changed my life.

This hit me more then I thought it would. I have never interacted with Bram, and I haven't used his software for long. But I love the legacy he left behind, the software industry is better for it.

My condolences to his family.

I probably wouldn't enjoy programming as much as I do if it wasn't for Vim. Thank you.

Hard agree. Vim made typing/editing a pure joy.

I'm no longer a software engineer but whenever I write or edit anything it's always in vim, nothing can beat it and it will be in my finger muscles forever. RIP Bram, you will be missed. Money is tight now, but I'll donate $50 just the same to his charity. If you're reading this and haven't yet, match me!

I remember feeling like a reached a next level as a software engineer once I started using Vim. It's been almost 10 years now and I still use it (through NeoVim and neovim-qt).

Thank you so much Bram!

I was introduced to vim at university around 2001. I wasn't great with it, but back then I occasionally was doing some basic sysadmining, and also sometimes hand-editing websites live over SSH and it was the best tool for me. I've started using it again in 2022 and am enjoying the experience!

Thank you Bram.

I remember it was 1997 when my older brother gave me his .vimrc file and explained to me a few of the basic commands. It took a few years but have used vim exclusively ever since. I’m deeply saddened by our loss in the open source community by this and wonder what contributions we can carry forward

Sad. I didn't interact with Bram much, but I did have an email exchange with him early in my software developer journey. I submitted a few patches to Vim and he helped me work through them to get them approved/merged. He was very patient and kind even though I was a complete newbie.

God bless you Mr. Moolenaar. VIM is the editor that built me, going on 20+ years now.

I only gave once several years ago to help children of Uganda. I will do again in his honor, https://iccf-holland.org/donate.html.

:wq

RIP. I started using Vim on Slackware iirc. Haven’t stopped.

I checked out various other clones back in the day — vim was way better afaict.

PS: A major reason I use Vim rather than Emacs is that the arrow keys worked in Vim but not emacs. On Slackware. No I don’t use the ijkl keys to move in Vim. :) :) #blubvimmer

Hmm. I also first used vim inside of Slackware and also use arrow keys in vim.

Not sure I've ever run into another person who admitted that publicly. Not that I think it's something that one should actually be ashamed of, it makes total sense. Just not a popular approach.

Everyone kind of finds their niche program to dig into unhealthily.

One of my professors did that with Excel. When I got my first job. I did that with Vim. 15m hacking on my .vimrc for every hour coding that first year I think. Time well spent years later. Thank you Bram.

Learning Vim was one of the most important steps in my life in the journey to escaping Windows and learning Linux/UNIX. I still use Vim every day as my primary text editor and it’s the first thing I install on a new Mac.

RIP Bram, I have made a donation to ICCF Holland in memoriam.

Amazing guy, I've been using vim daily for decades. I donated 5k to his charity a few years ago as a thank you. He sent a personalized thank you email.

https://iccf-holland.org/

So sad to hear. Vim got me hooked on programming. It's truly a revolutionary editor, and now has been adopted and improved by so many others. Bram really touched so many people through Vim. Thank you for your immense contribution to computer science. RIP.

Thank you, Bram Moolenaar, for literally changing the way that I interact with my text editor, and hence with my computer. I remember seeing a vim user for the first time, and just being in so much awe of what he could accomplish that I sat down immediately and started learning vim myself. I'm still on that learning curve, many years later.

Tangentially, is there any easy way to find out whom the black banner is for other than trial and error? Here I know because I searched for "died" on the front page and it brought me to this thread, but often I just find myself feeling a sense of dread at whom we've lost without being able to figure out who it actually is.

Personal office anecdote ca 2010: while he was walking past our desk area, someone shouted over to him: Bram, what editor are you using for Java? He answered with a smile: Eclipse of course. Very nice guy.

In the realm of text editors, Vim has been my unwavering companion for 25 years. It has become an integral part of my daily existence, an inseparable bond that defies the imagination of life without its embrace.

Farewell Bram!

VIM is not just my favorite text editor, but my favorite piece of software of all time on all platforms. I have only ever encountered so few minor issues, and Bram fixed them all quickly. He will be sorely missed.

>>> aptitude hold vim

For a while, until I get over this.

I've been teaching vim to hundreds of people and usually have about a dozen vim sessions open. So soon after Kevin, two names that are my heroes since the 90ies.

I remember the moment I decided to be a vimmer. I was in my first systems class in college, looking for advice. A senior asked me if I knew how to use vim, and with a few flicks of his wrists, split his screen into halves, quarters. I was sold.

I still wonder about what I encountered in that moment - a kind of honesty and stubbornness to build something true, universal, empowering. The restraint and confidence it takes, then, to present it as a blank canvas for all to build on.

Because vim exists, I know it is possible to build in that spirit; I will always strive to do so myself.

Another Vim vs Emacs story. One of my CS teachers at PUT (Poznań University of Technology) used to say: Kto ma jaja używa viaja

(which rhymes in polish and means: one who have balls is using vim) RIP

I will likely use some form of vim as my editor for the entirety of my professional life. Wish I could say I wrote software that would be used for an entire person’s lifetime. RIP Bram, you did good.

RIP. This makes me really really sad today. I first used vim when i was in college over 25 years back. And it was magical. It was my first tryst with what a text editor should be.

My .vimrc is 25 years old :(

:wq!

Eternal rest grant unto him. May perpetual light shine upon him.

That’s quite young, what a shame - Vim is amazing.

Bram wrote the only bit of software that never let me down once. RIP. You've done good to the world.

I met him in the Google Zurich office. He led an "Open Source at Google" talk as part of orientation for our group. Probably the best person to lead that talk at that time.

Have been using Vim for years since college. It helps me and teaches me a lot. Thank you, Bram. RIP.

RIP. Thank you for the tool that I’ve arguably used the longest.

It is a software that brings joy each time I use it.

At my first job out of university, we were deploying applications on Solaris servers. I had been using emacs as a text editor, and these servers only had vim installed. I mentioned installing emacs to my manager, and he said that learning vim would be a "feather in my cap." I took him up on that advice, which was sage wisdom.

I spent a lot of my career using various forks of vim as my primary editor, and still use it when I need to edit a file.

Thanks Bram! This world will miss you.

Using gvim to automatically edit and re-path thousands of ArcView 3 project files across our network shares in the early 2000s was one my "Behold! I am mighty and a god!" highlight moments.

Before that the project was "work with these 25 people and help them open each project and fix the broken paths interactively" (because servers changed).

The script ran at night and everyone's things "just worked" the next morning. It was glorious.

Thanks Bram.

Thank you Bram.

Thank you for your humanitarian efforts, your generosity, and of course your genius. It is because of these traits that your loss, though I never knew you personally, hits so hard. RIP.

:wq!

RIP. Vim is my main editor for 15 years already. I spend several hours in Vim everyday. It's so ingrained in my soul, I can't imagine how to work without Vim.

An absolute legend of computing, you fire up Vim you have his unforgettable name.RIP

Rest in piece Bram, and my condolences to his family. I hope to see the mainline vim project innovate and thrive so that Bram’s legacy can live on.

rest in peace, bram. thanks for all you've done to software world. you will be missed by many, including those Ugandan kids whose lives have been changed for the better.

to the bereaved, I send you my deepest condolences.

Very sad news - been using vim for decades, still use it every day as pretty much all of my colleagues use VSCode... I met him briefly at FOSDEM 20+ years ago, will have to see if I can find the photo I took of him looking slightly bemused when I showed him vim running on a Linux-ified iPaq with a touchscreen and no keyboard!

As others have said, time to make a donation in his honour.

Quite possibly my favorite software. Rest in peace.

Very sad to hear. I interacted with him only a couple of times, but each time I came away with a very good impression of the man. And, of course, I'm very thankful for the editor he created that I've been using daily for over a decade now. He will be missed by many, and I'm sure intensely by some. Rest in peace, Bram.

Sad day. I have used vim for about as long as it’s been around. Small fraction as a developer, but also for notes and editing huge text files. Always learn something new about it.

I salute his contribution to craft and more so his contribution to humanity for support of ICCF. We all can and should follow his example in whatever way possible.

I started using vim about 12 years ago during my first dev job, after challenging myself to learn enough of it to use it for a day. It's very possible that my muscle memory will retain vim keybindings for the rest of my life. His impact on so many people is the kind of thing that motivates me to write software.

As a newbie user of vim, i have to admit, this is a really sad news for all open-source community ! RIP Bram !

That's really sad, but I'm glad that his legacy will vastly outlive him.

Thanks for vim, Bram, and rest in peace!

I have been programming for more than 15 years. I've used vim since the very beginning and it always puzzled me as something so genuinely clever. Using vim is a joy. I feel good while doing it. Bram has been this strong influence in my life all due to his software.

I've been using Vim for the past 10 years every single day. I don't know any other software that I've used daily, with exception to the OS. While I come from the old school vi days, Vim really became the ultimate productivity in editing everything.

RIP Bram. I enjoyed meeting him in Zurich one time. He was good company. A really humble, sweet guy.

This is indeed a huge loss. I've used vim for over a decade now. Configuring and tinkering with it was and is always the first thing I do when I get a new machine. He's also a good person from the small amount of interaction I've had with him on github.

Sincerely saddened. Farewell Bram, and thank you for all the things you have brought to the world.

Vim has been a great companion in my life, thanks Bram. People wonder why this 30 year old piece of software is so beloved. Most will never know.

I enjoy typing 'vim' to start it up. I've created aliases for other programs, but not vim. 'v' would work quite well in my setup. I love those 3 letters.

Damn life, super sad, I feel like a silly chump [1] staring at the screen with an empty mind. [1] https://www.moolenaar.net/bright.html

Thank you for everything, Bram. Your legacy will live far, far beyond you. Farewell.

And on an old programming forum (where I wrote all my posts with the Vimperator external editor feature -- in Vim, of course), so my signature went.. :wq

Of course, the truely old school will point out that vi doesn't have :x and that its vim that does. Thanks Bram.

Thank you Bram for this amazing software that gave me so pleasure in learning and mastering!

He has helped many IT people avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and achieve great productivity. Vim has been a gift to humanity and his efforts will be fruitful for decades. He was certainly a true inspiration. May he rest in peace.

That's a sad news for the Vim community. Given that development was basically focused around Bram, it makes me wonder, what will happen with Vim now?

WIll someone step up and continue to develop Vim, or it will fade away and Neovim take its place?

I believe there is a development team actually in place but they probably have to decide the way forward now. I have little doubt it will continue.

Looking at the commit history, Bram was responsible for the majority of the development. Interestingly, the second most active vim contributor is a neovim developer (possibly porting fixes from neovim).

It seems to me that others often did preparatory work on the patches that he committed. For example:

https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/c12e4eecbb26cedca96e0810d3...

https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/12553

Hopefully something is in place with this official repo and we don't get a bunch of forks all over github. RIP Bram

I've since switched to Neovim, but only for the LSP, virtually using it like I would with Vim. Can't imagine working without it, and probably won't enjoy programming as much if not for Vim. Thank you and RIP, Bram.

This is sad news. I have been using VIM since I don't know when and for no reason I have never made a donation to it and felt a lot of shame. Just made it to ICCF Holland few minutes ago. RIP Bram and thank you for VIM! :wq

Thank you Bram for giving us software we can love and putting a :smile on our faces.

It breaks my heart to hear this sad news. I use Vim every day in my work. This is to say how grateful I am. I would like to offer my sincere condolences to his family and friends. May he rest in peace.

For me, vim means muscle memory. I can say that it has become part of me!

RIP Bram Moolenaar

I am so sorry to hear this. I will make a contribution today in his memory.

Done €100 to https://iccf-holland.org/

RIP This man is an absolute legend. <3

From https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/3tluqr/my_list_of_appl... :

> What are some useful applications with Vim keybindings?

I think this is the first time I've shed an actual tear for a famous person passing away.. RIP Bram Moolenaar. Vim was life changing for me and continues to be for many.

How many of us will be remembered like this? Not too many, I imagine. I'm teaching my 8 year old daughter to use VIM. As an African, what he has done puts me to shame.

Only interaction with him was via mailing list but liked and respected him. Been using VIM for ~20 years now. Upset at his death. Its too early to pass away at just 62.

I've been a vim user since 2004 when I had to use it as part of the introduction to UNIX course.

Thank you Bram for writing, maintaining, and improving vim over all these years.

vim absolutely changed me as a developer. it showed me a whole different way of editing code.

it's weird because i don't know him, but his death absolutely hit me hard.

rest in peace <3

Thank you, Bram, for vim. Thank you for how useful it is, and how rock solid it's always been for me.

No feeble attempt at humour from me, just heartfelt sadness and gratitude.

at least he went out with a :wq in this world, and not a :q!

Absolutely devastated at the news. Bram was really patient with me based on the few times I tried to contribute. I always liked his way of doing things, despite complaints from others.

I know there are a number of developers who regularly contribute and I hope they can continue developing for it.

Personally, I will archive Bram's last patch for posterity.

I use vim almost every single day, and use vim-dialect in every other editor I use. I'm thankful for its existence and to Bram for developing it.

RIP

vim might seem small on the grand scheme of things (npi), but as an interface to almost anything on a computer and for so long.. it's a real wound to read this

saying this as a mostly emacser..

:T_T

This is sad news. VIM is a software full of passion and love, but it is also culture, and its influence is on par with the greatest works of art.

I will forever be grateful for Bram's contribution to the world of free software and to humanity. I hope he will be remembered for a long time.

Incredibly sorry to hear this. The times I have seen his name.. or thought about who this guy might be, and that he not only is a super programmer but also a humanitarian. Too countless to think about. RIP.

@dang I know we don't see the black bar often but I hope it is possible

@dang I know we don't see the black bar often but I hope it is possible

You'll be seeing it *much* more often in the coming years as those of the older generation -- who made such large contributions -- pass on.

Sadly this was my thought too. It's a way to start feeling super old, when the first generation start to die, and very few of the heros of open source have. But we're all getting old...

Years ago I sent a donation to his charity and was pleasantly surprised to get a personal thanks from Bram. A wonderful person.

still use vim every day.

worked with him ~decade ago.

this hits hard.

does anyone know if his family needs help/is there a way to help out? i would love to give back if possible.

I can't access the group, but MK Productions' Killer Bob Saget 2000 changed my life, as a 10 year old learning QBASIC in the 90's. Then seeing his name again as I learned Vim as a young adult. Wow. I'm 37 but never thought he could've been much older than me. RIP, so much respect.

I love what I do as a software engineer and a huge part of that is because I have a tool like vim. Thanks Bram. Rest in peace.

RIP and thank you. Thoughts are with his loved ones right now.

Thank you Bram, you will not be forgotten. RIP

So long Brad, probably the single most used tool I've used over my career. Thanks for that!

I guess he finally learnt how to exit vim

Bram didn't exit vim; he's simply stopped typing. The spirit of Bram will always be with us.

I am greatly saddened by this news. Bram was a good person as well as a titan of open source. He will be missed.

Sad news. I am grateful for Vim and for Moolenaar. Deepest condolences to family, friends and the community.

What would you all think of naming an annual award for the greatest contribution to vim in Bram's honor?

I took all my notes in VIM for several years in college. To this day, I use Evil mode, Tridactyl, and various other tools inspired by the modal editing that VIM so advanced, and VIM itself remains a part of my toolkit on every system I use. I expect it will always be with me in some form.

RIP, Bram.^[:x

Oh damn, that makes me sad. I met him once at Vimfest in Berlin. He was such an intelligent and humble guy.

Damn. Rest in peace. Thank you for your hard work on my favourite editor. All the best to his loved ones.

I remember Bram Moolenar as the guy who had the "Help Children in Uganda!" button in the GUI version of Vim. Were it not for that, surely I would not have remembered the man: he would have just been an anonymous open source software developer.

I just signed up once I head the sad news. I love Vim (maybe more than it loves me), farewell and thank you.

:wq!

RIP, vim is some of the only software that works well that I can use pretty much anywhere.

Rest in piece Bram, your invention of keybindings will be everlastingly remembered by generations

I had interacted with him over the mailing list a few times and he was always very helpful. I'll miss him.

What a legend, the VI message stood out in my memory of Bram, what a kind and clever person.

Terribly sad news. Thank you, Bram, for the finest software tool I've ever wielded.

Rest in peace, sir. My thoughts are with the entire Moolenaar family and his loved ones.

Much gratitude to Bram for being such an inspiration - not just developing a super-useful project but thinking about how his work can be of benefit to the most needy. All his good works continue on!

Rest in peace, Bram. I'm forever grateful for your dedication.

Very sad to read this. Thank you, Bram, and see you in another life!

Rest In Peace.

VIM is still among my top used editors. And Bram was the one that made sure it kept improving and being useful for all those years, since I first used it on my Slackware install.

Rest in Peace! Thank you Bram for the wonderful contributions!

Rest in peace, Bram. I was introduced to Vim by my father when I was a kid, and have been using it for the past 15 years. Your software has touched many lives.

I'm still teaching GPT to understand Bram's magic. It is a work in progress, in memory of our Bram.

```gpt4.out

Bram Moolenaar, gone,

VIM's mastermind fades to black,

:wq, his final song.

In modes, he danced free,

Insert, normal, visual,

Code's choreography.

H, J, K, L's guide,

Cursor moved, not the fingers,

His wisdom inside.

Undo, redo, swap,

Infinite text maze tamed,

His legacy, non-stop.

Bram's journey, :q! done,

Yet in each VIM keystroke,

His spirit lives on.

```

Thanks for everything, Bram. Your memory will be a blessing.

https://www.moolenaar.net/bright.html :(

I have a love/hate relationship with vi and all its offspring, but I use vim pretty much every day - thanks Bram!

Rest in peace, Bram.

I only started vim a while ago but as I got used to it I could feel his vision on making a powerful text editor using only simple keybinds

As a long time vim user: Thanks Bram & Godspeed.

Thank you Bram for creating something that is truly useful and we use nearly everyday. May you Rest In Peace. My condolences to his family.

I have benefited so much from Vim and I am forever grateful for the incredible work Bram has done. Thank you so much, and rest in peace.

One of our servers are only accessible through PAM vpn in windows machine...

It doesn't allow Ctrl+<AnyKey>

So I cant edit files using nano...

And that's when I started using Vim

RIP Bram

Rest in peace Bram. You forever changed my life.

Rest in peace! I would not be able to function as a dev without Vim. Amazing work

RIP, Bram. Thank you, from a 22-year Vim user.

One of silent heroes of the open-source world - making life of so many people easier and more enjoyable every day. RIP.

Vim tortured and delighted me for many years. I still use it all the time - wild how much space it occupies in our minds.

Thanks Bram!

RIP, thanks for all the hard work and care.

If I'm honest, I don't know if I like programming or I just like using Vim. Thanks for everything Bram.

:q but always:w

Bram Moolenaar

:wq

I just wanted to say I’m really sad there’s no black banner for the whole day. I hope there is tomorrow.

Rest in peace, Bram. Thank you for Vim.

He was a great man. He will be missed.

I've used vim daily for years, must-have editor. My condolences to his family and friends.

Vim-In-Peace..

oh what! oh no :(

he finally figured out how to quit

As an old-time Amiga user, I was pleased to read that Vim first appeared on the Amiga.

:wq

The most programmer way to quit something. RIP

I learned vim young enough that I'll probably die editing text this way—RIP Bram.

Vim is my daily driver, I'm sorry to hear we've lost Bram so young.

RIP and thank you for vim, your effort and for caring about good software. ZZ

Reading this headline has hit me unexpectedly hard :( Black banner please.

RIP Bram. Thanks for creating the best text editor the world’s ever seen!

:'( RIP Bram

RIP Bram, thanks for all the shortcuts!

:wq!

My respects. I use vim daily. So long and thanks for all the fish!

Thank you Barm. :wqa!

R.I.P

From a man who use vim everyday.

:wq Bram, and thank you!

I know I’m going to miss reading his goofy email signatures.

Rest in peace Bram.

wq!

he had green squares until his death https://i.imgur.com/MrofIBq.png

As a long time vim user. Thank you and RIP, Bram Moolenaar.

:wqa!

RIP Legend :(

[Mods - Request for black bar, please]

Anyone have a favorite video/presentation of Bram’s?

For anyone looking to learn Vim, this is an educational game that's actually pretty fun:

https://vim-adventures.com/

It was the 'IRC style tutorial' ( https://www.vi-improved.org/irc-style-tutorial/ ) which helped make it click for me. (I feel like that was a lot longer ago than the publish date of 2016).

I loved that website at first but abandoned it in frustration an hour after I subscribed, because turned out it didn’t work with my QWERTZ layout.

thank you Bram. feeling humbled today. rest in peace.

Rest in peace, Bram! Thank you so much for vim!

Rest in peace, Bram! QQ Thank you so much.

donated! thank you, Bram, for our beloved vim

RIP, never met him, but I'm a VIM user.

Rest in peace Bram, gone, but not forgotten.

RIP Bram, VIM is an awesome gift to humanity

RIP Bram and thank you. I use VIM every day.

RIP, such a loss

Thank you, Bram!

R.I.P. Today is the day to donate to ICCF.

I use vim every day - RIP to a legend!

:wq. Thanks for keeping Vim copyleft.

seems like dang is using emacs ...

We got black bar. It just needed to propagate through the thousands and thousands of edge nodes powering HN.

Wasn't he quite young? :-(

never knew the guy yet having utmost respect

thanks Bram, you're a legend

vim is my favorite editor. Thank you Bram for your work and time, RIP.

:wq

RIP Bram

RIP

RIP :q

Rest in peace, Bram...

Rest in peace, Bram.

RIP Bram the Legend.

Thank you Bram.

Emacs just keeps on winning*

*I use vim on a daily basis and its very sad to see Bram go.

Thanks a lot! :wq!

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

:cry:

Thanks and RIP.

Thank you Bram!

rip bram, you will be remembered.

here's hoping he had a .swp

:wq

RIP Bram.

RIP

Rip

:wq

Huge, huge loss.

:wq!

Love vim

He finally :q vim, but with an !

Dang, this deserves the black bar.

Bram Moolenaar was the original author, maintainer, release manager, and benevolent dictator for life of Vim.

@dang can HN put a black banner for Bram Moolenaar please?

I think you mean ^A

This is the only vi-able action IMO.

Perhaps Dan is more of an Emacs guy.

The only problem is, some users will then be unable to exit, stuck in macro recording mode for eternity.

Just as Bram would want :)

How do I exit this thread?

Thank you Sir Moolenaar for this journey.

Definitely deserves a black bar.

VIM is definitely is one of those thin tiles that keep Open Source together

:wq and RIP

It seems unthinkable that Dang will not bestow this honor upon him. Given that it's currently early Saturday morning, we just have to wait.

This absolutely deserves a black bar.<ESC>:wq

Do people really not know :x == :wq ???

TIL

They're not equivalent.

:w will touch the file (update mtime) whether you've made changes or not

:x will only update mtime if the file contents are actually changed

They are similar, but I stick to :wq. I fear mixing up :x with :X. Would probably catch the mistake when being asked to type the encryption key, but anyway

> Would probably catch the mistake when being asked to type the encryption key, but anyway

Can confirm. I have accidentally typed :X many times, but have never accidentally encrypted a file

Black bar please! :wq

I think you mean:

  iPlease![ESC]Vx1000000p

I'm sure you meant

    1000000iPlease!<Esc>

I did, but that took a lot longer to process on my computer for some reason.

Same. Variations of Vim have been my go to editor for many decades now. Stellar achievement.

I support this request. :x

Another black bar +1. If anyone deserves it, it’s got to be the author of a critical part of my daily workflow for over 10 years.

A vote.

This feels monumental… can we get the black bar for the entire weekend.

This is the passing of someone that has fundamentally touched the lives of so many programmers… his work is now part of our very folklore, we make vim jokes, we emulate it in other tools, even the “enemy” (eMacs) eventually added evil mode (mind my humour it has sharp edges)… vim is mentioned in science fiction and has survived the journey from Unix to a plethora of other operating systems…

He will be missed.

>@dang

The email address I've used in the past has been responded to promptly, that's probably more effective than an @ mention:

  hn@ycombinator.com

@-mentions don't do anything. Email is the only reliable way to contact dang.

It depends... some users have their own custom notification systems. Many business control their PR here strictly.

But in general.. yes.

I'd be surprised if any of these pick up on "@name" specifically, rather than just "name".

:! !!

Not to sound bitter, but should we assume that dang does not consider the creator of vim to be worthy of a black banner? I keep forgetting that this site, despite having hacker in its name, is not really about hacking. Anyways, I hope Bram Moolenaar finds peace.

Or we could assume that dang is not awake 24/7, and does not have a neural interface to everything that happens on HN and in the world, and actually does other things with his life than moderate HN.

In short: he's such a lazy git with zero work ethnic.

Holy fuck… what… no!

Now I can exit Vim...

I cant believe they had the gall to write his obit in emacs!

RIP VIM

Wow, the comments on Slashdot are such a train wreck. Didn't realise Slashdot had become so bad.

I'd hardly call one or two virtue signalers a "train wreck" or "so bad"

I didnt find much supporting what you claim. It's possible whatever your referring to was cleaned up. I only saw one apparently negative post, which was deleted or hidden.

I have been saddened more and more by platform after platform devolving into nonsensical bickering. I'm almost entirely off social media at this point for that reason.

Having said that, I feel it only makes it worse when people division out of proportion making hyperbolic and sweeping generalizations. I feel like being unrealistic about signal to noise ratio only empowers the trolls.

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