Bram Moolenaar, Author of the Open Source Vim Code Editor, Has Died

The creator of one of the most popular programming editors of all time, Vim, has died after a brief illness. :wq.

You may not have known Bram Moolenaar’s name, but all developers know his open source programming editor, Vim. His family has reported to the Vim announcement list that Moolenaar has died.

According to the note, “Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.”

Bram suffered from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.” No further details are available at this time.

They added Bram had “dedicated a large part of his life to VIM, and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.” This is true. Under his guidance, Vim became one of the most popular code editors in the world.

Vim was based on Unix’s Vi, a screen-oriented text editor created by Bill Joy that proved to be immensely popular. Indeed, it was my first editor. Its command set, while often used in jokes, is powerful. It’s still embedded in my fingers today. I’m far from the only programmer who can say that.

However, Vi, which first appeared in the second edition of the Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD) Unix, wasn’t open source. It was a derivative work of AT&T Unix code. While it was ported to all Unix versions, you couldn’t port it to other operating systems.

You could look at Vi’s code so other developers quickly forked it. ST Editor for VI Enthusiast (Stevie) was the most important of these early forks. It was this code that Moolenaar used as the foundation for Vim.

As Moolenaar said in a 2012 interview with the Czech magazine LinuxEXPRES, like so many of us, he also had trouble at first with Vi. “We were forced to use this awfully complex editor, with only one sheet of paper for documentation. I started appreciating it only much later when it became clear that Vi allows for very quick editing. Once my fingers got used to it, anything else slowed me down. Thus once I got an Amiga computer, I just had to make a Vi-like editor. That was when I started working on Vim.”

Why? He explained, “It takes time to learn Vi or Vim before you can work productively. If you try it for ten minutes and then give up, you only remember that difficult time you struggled with. And when you never take the time to learn more than the basic commands, you will not profit from the possible effective editing. But when you learn to use Vim, you can work effectively and love using it.”

Moolenaar “started with Stevie. This Vi clone for the Atari ST computer was ported to the Amiga. It had many problems and could not do everything Vi could, but since the source code was available, I could fix that myself. That was also how I got to appreciate software being open source. Once the amount of changed code was more than the original Stevie code, I named it Vim.

Today, you’ll find Vim in essentially all operating systems. That’s both because it’s open sourced under the GPL-compatible Vim license. And, as he said in the interview, “I am using good old C code. To be compatible with as many C compilers as possible, I am very conservative in using the features of modern C compilers. This mostly only happens in GUI code, which requires a modern C compiler. The main code doesn’t even use ANSI function prototypes, because they don’t work on older systems.”

He was proud of his work. In a 2022 Evrone interview, Moolenaar explained that he’s proud of Vim and that so many others have enjoyed it. “Now that I am retired, it gives me something interesting, joyful, and useful to do. Vim is a very important part of my life.”

Vim is more than just a Vi clone. Its features are a superset of Vi. It includes syntax highlighting, and code folding for several popular programming languages such as C/C++, Python, Perl, and Bash. It also includes multilevel undo/redo, screen splitting for editing multiple files, and plugin support and scripting support with its own Vimscript, or external scripting languages.

Vim’s license does have one different clause in it. Technically, it’s charityware. The license asks but does not require that you donate to needy children in Uganda via International Child Care Fund for Uganda if you use Vim and find it useful.

In his recent interview, Moolenaar explained, “I have never wanted to make money from Vim. It started as a hobby, and most of the time, I had a job that paid well enough. So I decided to combine my desire to help poor children with that, and Charityware was born. It works well, about 30,000 euro per year is raised this way, which is helping about 50 children finish their education, from primary school to university.”

With his passing, his family is asking for more donations to this cause, which had been close to his heart. He was a great developer and person. Would that we could all say so much about ourselves. He’ll be missed.

:wq

👁 Exiting Vim the Arrival way -