@dang can HN put a black banner for Bram Moolenaar please?
@dang I know we don't see the black bar often but I hope it is possible
Thoughts are with his friends and family right now. Rest in peace, Mr. Moolenaar.
ZZ
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.
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...
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.
It is a software that brings joy each time I use it.
Can we please have a black banner?
:q
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.
:'( RIP Bram
to the bereaved, I send you my deepest condolences.
RIP and thank you. Thoughts are with his loved ones right now.
Thanks Bram, have a good afterlife.
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.
Thank you Bram for the work you put into Vim!
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!
ZZ
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.
No feeble attempt at humour from me, just heartfelt sadness and gratitude.
"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
RIP Legend :(
[Mods - Request for black bar, please]
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.
As others have said, time to make a donation in his honour.
Eternal rest grant unto him. May perpetual light shine upon him.
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
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.
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
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...
Thank you, sir. <3 vim
Thank you Bram.
Thank you Bram, and RIP.
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.
R.I.P
From a man who use vim everyday.
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.
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
> Keep me alive.[1]
[1] 10 Questions with Vim’s creator, Bram Moolenaar (2014) https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...
I think the black stripe should be on HN today; it's quite justified.
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.
WIll someone step up and continue to develop Vim, or it will fade away and Neovim take its place?
Huge, huge loss.
« 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!
Thanks for vim, Bram, and rest in peace!
he finally figured out how to quit
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.
I guess he finally learnt how to exit vim
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.
"Stichting ICCF Holland"
Is the name I search for.
RIP Bram, I have made a donation to ICCF Holland in memoriam.
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.
https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/6_yWxGhB_8I/m/ibserACY...
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.
RIP VIM
I never did. I hope I would have. :-(
RIP, mr Moolenar.
:q:wq!
Like there should be an open source lifetime achievement award or something. Like the academy awards.
Vim is a piece of software that has changed my life. Rest in peace, Bram, you will be missed. Condolences to Bram's family.
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.
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.
Thank you Bram for writing, maintaining, and improving vim over all these years.
Thanks Bram!
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.
*I use vim on a daily basis and its very sad to see Bram go.
RIP Bram Moolenaar
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.
RIP, Bram.^[:x
Rest in peace, Bram.
it's weird because i don't know him, but his death absolutely hit me hard.
rest in peace <3
:(
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.
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.
Thank you Bram.
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.
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.
Some context: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/ivkq22t3LQM
Thank you so much Bram!
My .vimrc is 25 years old :(
"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.
My condolences to his family.
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...
Moolenaar was an amazing programmer, and his impact will be long lasting. May he rest in peace.
Rest in peace Bram.
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.
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.
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.
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 ]
Farewell Bram!
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.
The most programmer way to quit something. RIP
You'll probably get emotional as I did if you click on this: https://github.com/brammool
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.
:wq!
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
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.
It doesn't allow Ctrl+<AnyKey>
So I cant edit files using nano...
And that's when I started using Vim
RIP Bram
RIP Bram. Thank you for making our daily lives that much more enjoyable.
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.
RIP Bram.
(which rhymes in polish and means: one who have balls is using vim) RIP
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.
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.
Vim-In-Peace..
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
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.
```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.
```
> What are some useful applications with Vim keybindings?
:cry:
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.
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