On the death of Bram Moolenaar: Vim luminary, globetrotter and fundraiser

On the death of Bram Moolenaar: Vim luminary, globetrotter and fundraiser

Anyone who works as a developer in the open source environment will eventually come across jokes about the command line editor Vi – and especially those that deal with the not very intuitive way of closing the editor that is already open. Most admins of Linux systems today are probably reminded of their own career: At the very beginning of their career, almost everyone has despaired of returning to the shell from Vi. Especially when a freshly installed Linux system has not yet loaded a German layout for the keyboard. The story has one flaw, however, because the vast majority of administrators were probably more involved with Vim than Vi. Vim is included as a standard editor in most Linux distributions, albeit in a very simple variant, and “vi” is usually even an alias for “vim”.

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Born out of necessity

The IT world owes Vim to Dutch developer Bram Moolenaar. When he bought an Amiga in the late 1980s, it only came with a poorly functioning version of the original BSD editor “vi”. Moolenaar did what was already common in the F/LOSS world at that time: He began to improve the program on his own with patches and adapt it to his own requirements. In 1991 he published an independent version of “his” editor for the first time under the name “VI Improved” or “Vim” for short.

Moolenaar stated in several interviews that he was surprised by the success of his project – which was actually only seen as a hobby – in the years to come. Because Vim quickly became the quasi-standard when it comes to command line editors and soon found its way into practically every relevant Linux distribution (including macOS, by the way). However, the success was by no means accidental: Over the years, Vim has developed into a world champion in versatility, which can be extremely flexibly adapted to the needs of the user and is still careful with the available resources of a system. Especially the latter point was originally a main motivation behind the development of Vim. After all, CPU cycles and RAM were different than the scarce commodities of today.

Moolenaar himself remained connected to “his” Vim over the years and acted in the project as “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (“benevolent dictator for life”) – in a similar role to that which Linus Torvalds also assumes for the Linux kernel. As part of this work, the popularity of Vim and Moolenaar itself grew: soon he was considered an affable developer with deep detailed knowledge, who first had to be convinced of new features and patches, but who could be convinced quickly and easily with factual arguments. Undoubtedly, Moolenaar was helped by the fact that he was always allowed to work on Vim as part of his job. Google allowed him to push ahead with the development of the free editor in addition to his work on Google Calendar. Undoubtedly also in our own interest: After all, a large part of the text work at Google should also be done internally using Vim.

Even if Vim development has become rather slow in recent years, Moolenaar did not see his work as finished: In mid-2022, for example, a fundamentally revised version of the editor appeared in the form of Vim 9, which cut off many old braids and the editor to a certain extent fit for the future. For his fans, Vim had always been that (fit for the future). Incidentally, the lines of this obituary are also created – like all of the author’s texts over the past 23 years – in a Vim instance adapted via “.vimrc”.

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Frequent traveler and fundraiser

In addition to his development work, Moolenaar enjoyed traveling the world and learning about other cultures and customs. His personal website is peppered with photos from his travels, which have taken him to almost every continent. The developer also combined his travels with a larger task. The African country of Uganda was particularly close to his heart: Here he worked through the Holland branch of the International Child Care Fund (ICCF Holland) to support children whose parents had fallen victim to the HI virus and the resulting immune deficiency AIDS are. Anyone who has opened “Vim” without passing a file as a parameter to the shell has already seen the appeal for donations in this regard. The “:help iccf” command still works in Vim and provides information on how to send money to the ICCF.

According to Moolenaar, most of the money that has been raised in the form of donations for the benefit of Vim development over the past few decades has gone directly to the ICCF and thus to charitable causes in Uganda. It is true that Moolenaar has influenced the course of the world primarily through Vim – but he undoubtedly also leaves behind the “dent in the universe” that Steve Jobs liked to try through his social commitment and his charitable work.

Talking shop in the afterlife?

According to a statement from his family, Bram Moolenaar passed away on August 3, 2023 as a result of a rapidly deteriorating illness. Anyone who believes in an afterlife can now imagine Sven Guckes and Bram Moolenaar talking shop about the cult command line editor. The authors, with whom Moolenaar has already worked closely, want to continue developing it in his spirit.

So farewell, Bram, and: “:wq!”

(tiw)

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