RIP Bram Moolenaar, the author of vim text editor

Technology@lemmy.world – 974 points – 11 months ago

groups.google.com

Here is a message from his family

He finally figured out how to exit

Poor taste.

A lot of the comment's I've seen everywhere over this news is "exiting vim" out of respect and admiration. They aren't being disrespectful but honoring the legacy that he fostered, and remembering the hard parts of his software.

There's a difference between making a vim reference and "oh, a mourning family message? quick, i must find a stale joke to crack for internet points"

Feel free to tell yourselves this is respectful. I think some people here have been on the internet for too long.

Type :f to pay respects.

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Pretty much any program I use I try to shift over to vim style keys. This guy's reach went far beyond vim to me.

The hjkl keys came from Bill Joy when he wrote vi. The terminal he was using had arrows printed on those keys because it didn't have dedicated arrow keys. It was a natural progression to reuse those keys for navigation.

vim was a huge improvement over vi. To where it became the defacto replacement. Some distros even shipped vim as a replacement for vi. That was because the Linux Standard Base required vi to be present.

Still a huge influence. vi was a bit painful to use when coming from vim. Would hjkl have died out if it wasn't for vim? IDK. I think it would have been relegated to a niche corner of the unix/linux world.

The terminal he was using had arrows printed on those keys because it didn’t have dedicated arrow keys.

That terminal was also responsible for ~ used as home dir in path and ^ as beginning of string in regex.

Wow TIL

RIP, Mr. Bram Moolenaar.

Thank you for the VIM.

Now the time has come for the VIM future.

https://joshtronic.com/2018/08/12/will-vim-die-with-bram-moolenaar/

Or we could all just move to nano and be less frustrated.

Damn people here really hate nano 😂

Na, it’s just that a memorial post is a time to pause the editor wars, if only for a moment, and pay respect.

Nah I'll pass on that, nano feels dirty.

I'm rarely as frustrated as when something opens with nano when I'm expecting Vim.

ed is the standard text editor.

I mean it was on a response with a link detailing the single threaded nature of vim development.. I don't think it was inappropriate

I started with nano, learnt vim and now using neovim.

I am waiting for neovim 1.0, using vim until there.

Neovim is stable even though it is still using minor version number.

The eco system booms after 0.5 (lua support, lsp and treesitter) and after lazy.nvim.

The guy onse famously responded to the question of how the community can ensure that vim project succeeds for the forseeable future with "keep me alive". Seems like there is our fault :(

RIP the legend. Keep Vimming.

I probably owe that man a good part of my living. Proof that even gods are mortal

Great words. He may be gone now but he's got all us nerds in here thanking him and pondering the good ol days where his passion helped so many. Shit could be our eulogy from lemmy.

RIP ☹️

what an amazing editor he developed on top of vi, he'll be remembered

This news hit me hard this morning. Bram's work has directly benefited my career for decades. He was a good human being who did good things. RIP Bram

RIP and thanks for all the hard work I've benefited from over the last decade.

I'll think of this man while explaining vim to my new hire next week.

:f For the sophisticated users, for the gen pop :q!

He has left his mark in a way that few are able to

That's very sad to hear. Bram had a significant impact on me and how I use my computer. Rust zacht, Bram.

R.I.P. Bram.

I use VIm every day, I enjoy using it, I am still in awe when discovering stuff, still after 17y!

RIP Bram Moolenaar, and my condolences to his family

Rest in peace, Bram Moolenaar! Thank you for your work, I use vim every day.

Dang.

We as family are now arranging the funeral service of Bram which will take place in The Netherlands and will be held in the Dutch lanuage. The extact date, time and place are still to be determined.

Hmm.

Why hmm?

They couldn't be bothered to proofread the letter. It's somewhat disrespectful

Clearly English isn't the first language of the writer. How disrespectful to invite members of the community to his funeral services indeed.

So being Dutch means you can't use spellcheck or get someone else to double-check? My native language is Afrikaans, which is 95% Dutch, but my social media posts are still more thorough than this announcement

This isn't a tweet. It's announcing someone's death

Or they don't speak English very well because they're Dutch

In my experience, Dutch speak better English than most people from the US.

Good grief

I loved him in jackass.

Angry upvote