I woke up to a huge gut punch this morning: Bram Moolenaar, legendary author of the Vim text editor, has passed away. Given the occasion, I want to express some thoughts regarding both Bram and his software. Without his work, I'm not sure I would be the same person.

How I found Vim

On a wintry Wisconsin night in 2004, I was looking for better, more customizable software. I was a teenager, learning about alternative OSes and losing patience with Windows every passing day. I had started getting more serious about learning web development, and began trying different text editors, to see what was to my taste. As we all know, Notepad on Windows is NOT sufficient for programming.

On this path of discovering text editors, I stumbled across all sorts of things, from UltraEdit to metapad, Notepad++, gedit, AceHTML, Emacs, and eventually I found this free software called "vim", but it came with some newbie-friendly settings, called Cream. (I was surprised to see it's still around!) One thing that stood out to me about Vim, at the time, was the fact I didn't have to enter some weird licensing scheme. I didn't have to pay to unlock features, and the big thing was -- if I wanted to help, I could donate to a charity that actually helped people! That stuck with me, morally. "Huh, all these companies are making software for profit, but this guy from Europe just wants me to help some less fortunate people. That's awesome."

I would not realize it until years later, but discovering Vim was a key step in my journey to libre software and GNU/Linux. Had I not been looking for a free, customizable text editor to do what I wanted, it may have delayed or slowed my introduction to that world.

How I Use Vim Today

These days, I keep a small group of plugins (mostly things like fugitive, tabular, sparkup, and some syntax stuff), a hefty vimrc with keyboard layout switching capabilities, and there's almost always a Vim process open on my machines. It earned a place as my favorite piece of software when I learned how easy it is to extend its behavior. No other piece of software evolves with me and my skill level like Vim does.

I love Vim's documentation system the most, I think. If there's anything I don't know about Vim, I can consult :help and get answers immediately. For anything else, there is a broad community of fellow text-heads out there, who might even have saved a fricken macro for the task you're trying to achieve.

Each time I learn something new about Vim, I feel like I've unlocked a new ability, or added a new text wrangling tool to my belt. This, in turn, improves my ability to manipulate text and makes the editing experience that much better.

The Future of Vim

It seems that Bram had tapped a successor, in some way, before he died, but the state of things with the Vim project seem to indicate his death was not expected, per se, though he had been ill for a few months prior to his death. It is sad to see another one of the "original breed" of FOSS hackers pass on. It stands as a reminder of how little time we really have on this rock, and the importance of choosing goals that one can look back on with pride. I hope that the new primary author and maintainer, Christian Brabandt, leads the project with the same core values that Bram did. Christian expresses his thoughts in the Google Groups thread.

Vim is the reason I discovered the Free Software movement. It's the software that I use most in my day-to-day computing. How strange, that a journey for a good text editor led to me discovering an entire social movement of hackers that I still hover around to this day, nearly 20 years later. Thank you, Bram, for bringing joy to my computing and rewarding every new morsel of knowledge I gain about this beautiful tool.

I have nothing but condolences for the Moolenaar family in their time of grieving. I hope their hearts are made lighter by the worldwide celebration of Bram's wonderful work, and the many testimonies people are publishing today which show how influential he was. We are all privileged to have received his work.

Please consider donating to ICCF Holland if you wish to leave a token of appreciation for Bram. It's what he would ask for.