EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim | Hacker News Reader

EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim

codeberg.org

44 pointstodsacerdoti65 comments

Forker’s bio:

”I am NerdNextDoor, an autistic OS developer from Scotland who is heading to College soon with the end goal of doing Computing Science in University with some experience in (not much of any, but a bit of) Kuroko, C and Assembly in some architectures.”

Indeed.

It would be nice if specific offending portions of the codebase were highlighted. As of now, it’s hard to see why one should use this fork. Also, since the source is available, anyone can just compile a past version of vim.

A cursory search didn't turn anything up in the vim repo or elsewhere. I can see why the authors of the fork wouldn't want to stir up drama, but I am really curious too.

Agreed. Without the context it just feels like a petty reaction. For all the reader knows, it could be completely unrelated to AI. The repository owner could’ve had a falling out with the maintainers regarding features or may be trying to inject their own malicious code into the fork.

It’s not about specific offending portions, it’s the principle of having any LLM contributions at all. There’s a group of people who are so opposed to this stuff that they object to its mere presence anywhere.

The issue with that stance, practically speaking, is that anyone could have hand-submitted generated code at any time, so why this January cutoff date?

I would expect a decrease in code quality in a specific part of the repo or at least a quote/link to a changelog stating that generated code is being used as part of the fork making its case.

They're already talking about pushing it back farther, trying to revert/rewrite every commit from users suspected of ever using LLMs. Practicality doesn't really enter into it, this is an ideologically driven project that insists on getting rid of the "taint." https://codeberg.org/NerdNextDoor/evi/issues/19

I understand it is an ideological project. My point is that given their intent, there are things they should do to make their case. They should provide the evidence in the README etc.

If they are correct and things must be done, they aren’t providing the evidence. That’s not the same as saying there’s no evidence or reason to take this stance. Do you see the distinction I am making?

Are you talking about evidence that LLM contributions are harmful, or evidence that there are any? The former is unnecessary, as this is not an evangelism project, it's for people who already believe LLMs are bad. For the latter, I think the project is aimed at people who are already plugged into the issue, or suffers from the usual mistake of thinking everyone is plugged into a specific issue. In any case, it takes about five seconds to search for "claude" in the main vim repo's PRs and find that evidence.

It’s about demonstrating via the diligence that you are a good steward of a fork. This is a requirement of any fork for it to take and be stable.

That’s the trouble with ideological projects. They tend to focus on the one thing and neglect the rest.

I tried to find any recent issues related to AI in the Vim repo, but did not find any.

Offending commit https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/fc00006777594f969ba8fcff67...

Just Claude as a co-author.

There's a bunch of commits that have "supported by AI claude." as well. Whatever that's supposed to mean.

the lesson here is dont put those comments into your commits. use the tools you want to write code and just use them. it's nobody else's business. if someone overuses AI (which is common) it's quite obvious anyway

These "Co-Authored-By" messages are added automatically by Claude Code when it makes commits on its own, although you just need to instruct it not to do so.

Agreed. It's impossible to enforce a user to disclose whether their commit has any AI influence or output anyway. Hard forks like this are just a short-sighted reaction.

If the person behind this fork has been active in FOSS or commercial development at all in the last 3 years, The odds they've never come across undisclosed AI-generated code that looked reasonable has to be close to zero.

> it's nobody else's business

Human origin certification is coming. It might be hard to enforce, but you should probably respect the intent if a project tries to enforce it.

It’s someone else's business when you want your works to have a relationship with the world. Or were you content with talking to nobody?

im required to disclose AI use in my own OSS projects on github? no, I'm not

Whether it's someone else's business that you're using AI does not require you to do anything in particular. This is a discussion on the relevance of motivations.

The reason for the fork:

> EVi is a hard fork from Vim v9.1.2073 (Jan 2026) to build further upon the foundations of Vim, while avoiding AI taint.

I wish they would have included at least one example of the "taint" on vim. If it's "tainted" enough to justify a hard fork, then surely there's some evidence. Without that, it just rings like an ideological thing.

Does anyone have some example(s) they can point to?

It is very much an ideological thing.

> https://codeberg.org/NerdNextDoor/evi/issues/19

This does not inspire confidence in the maintainers.

> to build further upon the foundations of Vim, while avoiding AI taint.

Did I miss something ? Where is the AI Taint coming from ?

What is AI-taint and why is regular vim tainted?

I would guess it means they accepted AI generated submissions into the vim codebase.

There's a discussion in the EVi repo about needing to find people who know vimscript. Funny enough, I am planning to use contributing some vimscript to an extension as my first AI coding agent project partly because I don't know vimscript well. Although that does mean it'll be hard to critically evaluate the output. I can compare it to the rest of the code in the extension at least to make sure it fits the style.

I have been writing a vim coding assistant harness in vimscript. I'm now writing it with itself. It's a weird language, and not terribly well represented in training sets compared to other languages. But it's fun - you can do things like divide by zero. On purpose.

Very nice, will look into it myself. Now if only they can set the defaults back to what vim 6.x used I will be happy.

The new defaults drive me crazy and I had to update ~/.vimrc to disable them.

This is what I had to add, but once in great while a default will be reset which I have yet to figure out why that happens.

    :let no_man_maps=1
    :let loaded_matchparen = 1
    :set comments=""
    :set matchpairs=""
    :set mouse=
    :set nocin
    :set nohlsearch
    :set noincsearch
    :set nois
    :set paste
    :syntax off
    """ disable autocomments
    :au FileType * setl fo-=cro
    """ turn off brace match comment matching
    set noshowmatch
    """ stop autoindent
    set noautoindent
    :filetype indent off
    ""set columns=80
    set noundofile
    set showmode ruler
    " turn off a new vim 8 default
    set scrolloff=0

Assuming you already had a ~/.vimrc, the only non-defaults in that list are:

    :let no_man_maps=1
    :let loaded_matchparen = 1
    :set comments=""
    :set matchpairs=""
    :set paste

All the other lines set options to their default value, which is pointless.

The values for 'comments' and 'matchpairs' are incorrect, they should be:

    :set comments=
    :set matchpairs=

Enabling 'paste' by default is a very bad idea, with lots of side-effects.

Setting the following variable is useless if you don't enable the 'man' plugin, but maybe you do it manually during a session. I don't know. YMMV.

    :let no_man_maps=1

Thanks,I will have to revisit the settings. These are from the move to vim 7.0. 7.0 without these settings was a nightmare and if one was missing it would not work the way I wanted it to.

>All the other lines set options to their default value, which is pointless.

I kinda like doing this for some programs, both as a way to see the current settings at a glance, and to avoid issues if defaults change in an update. At least twice mpv has changed default behavior and ruined my day. Once when they made scrolling vertically change volume instead of seeking (trying to match VLC?), and once when they disabled subtitles if the language matched the audio. Both easy to fix in the config file, both cases where I liked the default until they changed it.

The AI genie is already out of the bottle; there is nothing you can do to avoid it.

I have been slow to accept it, but here we are. I think the best way forward is to write better, more opinionated linting and testing for your project. If there are certain stylistic choices you prefer, explicitly test for them, and automatically fail PRs that don't pass. If something gets through that you don't like, update your linting.

Which ironically, would be more difficult for humans, but at least your incoming contributions will be better.

I was going to comment how it might be ironic to call the project evil instead, but remembered that's the name for the vim emulation on emacs.

This kind of news are about nothing. Tell me in a year, even in 3 months, how your fork has been doing. Clicking Fork on gh and writing a blog post is not a fork. A fork is a lot of work. Color me surprised if this will even keep up with the upstream just filtering out the AI commits.

Fabulous! Compiled & installed on my Fedora dev VM, no issues. Glad to see the effort made, and I expect we'll see a lot more projects like this going forward as slop unfortunately pervades more OSS.

Same motivation, different generation. I carry my own fork of vim 5.7, from around 2000. It did what I needed, and did it well, and I could already see where it was going.

SMH at what I see in it now!

> while avoiding AI taint

Don't be shy. Tell us what you really think.

Honest question: why would anyone use Vim and not NeoVim nowadays? I've switched what, 12 years ago? And I've never had to look back. Just curious, to be honest. Especially since neovim is full of new features, while the Vim9 scripting language kind of tanked

I'll field this one as someone who has used regular ol' Vim for ~18 years and never switched. Why switch if your tool is working fine? I use vim literally every day all day long and it does everything I need it to do. Switching has a cost and there's no reason to pay it if it's working fine.

I ended up switching for plugin support. Other than that, unless you want to use Lua for your config files, I don't see a reason to switch either.

I originally switched because neovim was more polished, had better plugins and Lua config files. I then never had a reason to go back

I think I first switched because neovim supported the XDG config location, I could have ~/.config/nvim/init.vim instead of ~/.vimrc.

I use both gvim on linux and macvim on mac for a lot of things--not 'real' coding, typically, but opening and editing scripts and config files, writing in markdown, etc; I'm usually opening these from dolphin or finder. In the terminal, working on real code bases and not scripts, I use neovim. My configs for these have diverged a bit over the years but since the use cases are different, it doesn't bother me.

muscle memory mainly, I guess?

Sure, switching might not be that troublesome, but I can tell you the first 48 hours or so will be painful, you'll insert stray ":" and "i" characters everywhere :)

I barely use vim these days, and I still do that in every text editor.

One reason might be how off-putting the Neovim community is, hijacking Vim discussions to denigrate an all-time-great, beloved work of technology and its creator (who did decades of work for free, gave it to the world, and gave any money to actual orphans) all for Neovim users'/devs' own egos, promotion, and obsession. Almost all of Neovim was made by Moolenaar, from concept to execution, and I don't know that I've ever seen any gratitude.

I've never seen Vim users do that. If I had to choose, I'd use Vim.

Just want to say that although I don't use either Vim/Neovim, I feel grateful for what Vim has done. Vim keybindings can be used by a multitude of editors and you can even have the keybinding concept into browsers and other software's.

Its truly revolutionary when one thinks about it how much impact Vim has on terminal users.

(Neovim's plugin system is nice but I agree with ya that I also feel like some aspects of community often don't appreciate Bram because of the Vim vs Neovim thing from my observation) It's best if instead of treating it as Vim vs Neovim, we use the tools that we prefer and appreciate the tools other are using too and the contribution of one in another. Appreciating Vim doesn't make your appreciation for Neovim lesser, appreciating both can be great. Something which is hard within Editor space in general.

Rest in peace Bram.

Can't say I really interact with the "community", I installed the program and I use it a lot. I am grateful for the existence of vi and vim. I now use neovim where I can. vim or vi as needed.

Because I don't choose what tools are available on every server at work, and it's guaranteed that at the very least old-school vi is installed on every linux server, and often vim. Maintaining that muscle memory is useful.

I used to think this too, but I routinely switch back and forth between neovim and vim now for close to a decade, and I've never noticed. In fact I often don't even notice which one I'm using unless I explicitly check. Once you add neovim-only plugins that can change of course, but if you can't choose what tools are available on the server then I would imagine you're not installing plugins anyway.

gvim?

I didn't switch because there was no reason to. And there is still none.

Have you ever called neovim inside a venv? Didn't work for me (or maybe I'm too lazy to jump hoops, if vim is working out of the box).

"AI Taint" you mean code that is written better and faster than humans? I've been programming since 2002 and I consider myself a better than average programmer and I have no problem admitting that using Claude Code has dramatically improved the quality and speed of my output.

> I consider myself a better than average programmer and I have no problem admitting that using Claude Code has dramatically improved the quality and speed of my output.

Genuine question but is it really your output anymore?

There are projects where the output is all what matters for example (Some script/basic project-prototyping/idea-validation) and then there are outputs where you want to feel the ownership "my code, my software"

AI has definitely tainted the latter and depressed people into not releasing source code anymore because they feel like AI will just train on it/ AI issues and even read the Sam and matplotlib on that whole controversy. So in my opinion, AI has definitely tainted some pretty valuable priceless things.

Why am I entirely unsurprised that this anti-LLM hard fork is hosted on Codeberg? At this rate, how likely is it that Codeberg is just going to become a wasteland of abandoned ideological forks (with the exception of one or two major projects) by next year?

I'm not sure what the angle of where it's hosted is.. Are you suggesting the project would have more legitimacy if it was hosted on github ?

From what I've read of Codeberg it's user base is a tad tetchy and has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. It was more of a comment on Codeberg than the project itself.

Codeberg has always been like this for what its worth. One of the most starred projects on Codeberg is a wayland terminal called foot (Which I used to/use btw, highly recommended terminal) :]

> It was more of a comment on Codeberg than the project itself.

This is more so an observation of Centralization. Let me explain.

Centralized platforms like Reddit/Twitter/Github usually exist. Fediverse solutions like Lemmy/Mastodon/Codeberg (Codeberg is adding fediverse support) to some degree exist to counter the centralization.

You use mastodon because you don't want twitter/reddit. You don't want twitter/reddit because you don't ideologically support it or the idea of proprietory commercial solutions in general.

The latter community of fediverse is also more likely to care about Privacy in the sense that they sacrificed some comfort to support open source project by actually using it.

And when you think about it, This all boils down to ideology. We want open standards of internet, not Centralized behemoths. This Ideology is similar to anti AI resistance and for good reason because guess what or who again are training AI models on the corpus of text available on centralized media.

If not for Ideological reasons, then you had no reason to use codeberg for a long time. Now you do, because Github has turned to shit. But the reason I had made an account on Codeberg some 2 year ago was because of my ideology of not wanting a Github account in general and support open standards in general until I caved in to Github someday to make some issues and star some projects.

I am thinking of going back to codeberg seeing the enshittenification of github... Codeberg winning is a net positive for society in general given its open source/non-profit nature.

Reminder to donate to Codeberg as it actually runs on donations :]

Codeberg has my favorite UI of the bunch as well. As a regular user rather than a programmer, I really appreciate how easy it is to find both Issues (I am a frequent bug reporter) and Releases near the top of the page. GitHub hides Releases on the side or bottom (mobile), and GitLab's UI is such a mess I don't even know where to start. I've often edited my URL to get to Issues or Releases on some git forges because it's easier than dealing with their UI.

Given githubs stance on AI "coding" it would be hypocritical to host the project on github.

So it's a fork based on principle ? I'm a slop hater as much as the next one but that really does seem petty.

Making a decision on principle is the opposite of petty, isn't it?

Yes, the location of the repo really doesn't mean much to me at all, complaining about it being hosted somewhere because of principle is certainly petty.

> At this rate, how likely is it that Codeberg is just going to become a wasteland of abandoned ideological forks (with the exception of one or two major projects) by next year?

I don’t know. What makes you curious about that?

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