The state of Vim

The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on "the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.

Vim after Bram

Brabandt began with his history with Vim: he has been involved in Vim since 2006, and said his first commit to the project was made in the 7.0/7.1 days (sometime around 2006). He started by contributing small patches and fixes, and then contributed larger features such as the gn and gN commands, which combine searching and visual-mode selection, improved cryptographic support using libsodium, maintained the Vim AppImage, and more. He said he became less active in the project around 2022 due to personal and work-related reasons.

That changed in August 2023, when Moolenaar passed away. Moolenaar had been the maintainer of Vim for more than 30 years; while he had added Brabandt and Ken Takata as co-maintainers of Vim in the years before, most development still flowed through him. With his death, a considerable amount of knowledge was lost—but Brabandt and others stepped up to keep the project alive.

Moolenaar was the only owner of the Vim GitHub organization at the time, so only his account could change certain settings. Initially, contributors tried to use the GitHub deceased user policy to add owners to the organization. That was quite an involved process, and it soon became apparent that the end result would be the deactivation of Moolenaar's account. Having Moolenaar's account be accessible by his family was important, so they abandoned that approach, and instead the family granted access to it as needed for organizational changes.

Charles Campbell (known as "Dr Chip"), a Vim contributor for more than 25 years also decided to retire soon after Moolenaar's death. His departure was followed by an expansion of the team of maintainers, as Yegappan Lakshmanan joined it, with Dominique Pellé, Doug Kearns, and GitHub users "glepnir", "mattn", and "zeertzjq" joining soon after.

More than just the source code

He stressed that maintaining Vim is not just about the source code. There are quite a few other things to be managed, such as the Vim web site, FTP server, security disclosures, Vim communities on other sites such as Reddit and Stack Exchange, and more.

Vim's site needed work. The design, and most of the code, had been unchanged for quite a while—until 2023, it was based on PHP 5. In recent times, there had been a few occasions where the web site was unstable, and so he started looking for a new host in 2024. The move involved an upgrade to PHP 8, for which some of the code had to be rewritten. Brabandt thanked Mark Schöchlin, who stepped up to take care of all this.

He acknowledged that the design has been pretty much unchanged since 2001, doesn't look modern, and can be scary to new users. There has been some work on redesigning it, but the first attempt hasn't been that successful. He prioritizes consistency and does not wish to scare away longtime users.

DNS was also troublesome—the vim.org domain was managed by Stefan Zehl, but Moolenaar also owned a number of other domains such as vim8.org, vim9.org, etc. Thankfully, SSL certificates were already managed using Let's Encrypt, so Brabandt had no problems there. Several email addresses, such as bram@vim.org, bugs@vim.org, etc., were forwarded to Moolenaar's personal email; those have since been updated to point to Brabandt's address instead. The FTP server was hosted by NLUUG, but he decided to retire it and says that he hasn't received any complaints so far.

ICCF Holland

As readers might know, Vim is charityware, and the charity of choice is ICCF Holland, founded by Moolenaar. Brabandt said that the ICCF is very much alive, and plans to reorganize and restructure itself. Quite a few users started donating after Moolenaar's passing, and in 2023, it raised about €90,000. The project plans to continue to work with ICCF and doesn't want to change ICCF's association with Vim. He noted that there is no sponsorship for the maintainers, all of whom are working for free. Traditionally, all money raised has been given to the ICCF and he has no plans to change that. Brabandt said he earns enough from his job that he doesn't need assistance to work on Vim, so he's happy to let all donations go to ICCF.

As an incentive to donate, Moolenaar had allowed people who donated to ICCF to vote on Vim feature requests. Donors to the ICCF could link to their Vim.org account when donating, and then vote on features. This is one aspect that he no longer sees a need for, now that issues and enhancements are discussed on GitHub, and so has decided to shut this down. Linking the accounts and donations was also not easy for Brabandt—he was not sure how Moolenaar did this in the past.

Communication channels

He also talked about the community centered around the Vim mailing lists, which are hosted on Google Groups. In May 2024, he received an automated message from Google informing him that all content from the vim-dev list had been blocked due to spam or malware. This caused a fair bit of trouble, and while it was restored in around a day or so, he still does not know what the exact problem was. There has been some consideration of self-hosting the list, but one drawback is that everyone would have to sign up again. The mailing list is no longer that active now, with more of the community conversations happening on Reddit or Stack Exchange.

Security reporting had to be addressed as well. A couple of years ago, people were reporting issues on the Huntr platform. There were quite a few open issues which have since been taken care of. Huntr was acquired by another company in 2023, which refocused it entirely on AI and shut down general open-source vulnerability reporting.

Now, Vim is accepting security reports via email or GitHub, and publishing vulnerabilities via GitHub security advisories. There is a private mailing list for as-yet unpublished security issues, and emails are forwarded to all maintainers. Brabandt has started adding a [security] tag to commit messages for marking security fixes, and such commits are announced on the oss-security list (the most recent being from October) and to maintainers of distribution packages.

Maintenance mode

Brabandt then showed the contribution graph, to demonstrate that development did not stop after Moolenaar passed away. There was a slowdown as Moolenaar's health deteriorated, and then a spike as he cleaned up the open pull requests (PRs). Version 9.1, dedicated to Moolenaar, was released on January 2, 2024—about four months after his passing.

The 9.1 release included improvements to virtual text (which enables completion suggestions and such to appear in the editing area, while not being part of the actual text), smooth scrolling, and OpenVMS support. After 9.1, he started adding more potentially controversial changes, such as support for the XDG base directory specification. Now Vim does not need to litter your top-level home directory: ~/.vimrc or ~/.vim/vimrc still work, but $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/vim/vimrc will now work if neither of the above are present. Another such change is Wayland support. It is not complete yet, and he says he is not sure whether remaining problems with clipboard support are Vim bugs or Wayland ones.

As he went through the backlog of PRs, he started developing a policy for merging PRs, prioritizing the need to test things well. Tests are now running with continuous integration (CI). He said that it's also important to have good documentation.

Vim has interfaces to quite a few languages, including Python 2 and 3, Ruby, Lua, Tcl, and MzScheme. But Brabandt isn't sure which of these are really needed these days. For example, Python 2, Tcl, and MzScheme (which does not build with the latest version of the language) might need to be retired to reduce the maintenance burden. Other areas to improve include the GUI (GTK 4 has been around for a while, but Vim does not use it yet), support for advanced terminal features, and better spell checking (which has largely remained unchanged since Vim 7). Support for the tree-sitter parser generator is wished-for, but it is controversial, and he does not see it coming to Vim soon.

He knows there have been some significant changes in Neovim, but he's not sure how many of those can come to Vim. There have been small changes in Vim, but for major changes, you need community support. He does not want to make backward-incompatible changes and is quite hesitant to merge changes that might break things. He said he has to keep in the mind the whole picture, especially the expectations of users, when dealing with PRs. Currently, he said that Vim is more-or-less in maintenance mode.

He said he has created an internal repository to keep track of stakeholders and to ensure that if something were to happen to him, other maintainers could pick up where he left off.

Brabandt recommended that those new to the project start by making small contributions and becoming familiar with the codebase. He had some pointers for developers. He said it is important to use a defensive style with C to ensure that new bugs aren't being introduced. One should use Coverity, a static-analysis tool, to scan for defects. Some parts of the Vim codebase are complex, he said, and need to be refactored into more manageable units if possible.

Maintaining Vim is a full-time job, he said, and it is not only about maintaining the code, but also the community—managing expectations and listening to users' needs. He has to understand the community: what does it want Vim to be? An IDE? Bug-for-bug compatibility with old Vim? How can we make Vim9 script, the new Vim scripting language, more widely used? How can we ensure that the Vim community remains healthy? He ended his talk by thanking all the Vim contributors and then took a few questions.

Questions

One audience member asked about the difference between Vim and Neovim's maintenance model. Since most PRs are still merged by Brabandt, would that make him the new BDFL for Vim?

Brabandt emphatically denied being a BDFL. Currently, he merges most changes because the version number has to be incremented with each change, so multiple people merging can introduce conflicts. However, when he was on vacation, he handed over the main maintainership to Lakshmanan. He emphasized that it's a community project, and he listens to the community before making decisions. It just happens that at this time the other maintainers don't want to merge changes themselves and instead defer to Brabandt, which is fine with him.

Another member of the audience wondered about language barriers, since there are many Japanese members of the Vim community as well as many languages in Europe, etc. Brabandt answered that, as an international project, the primary language for working on Vim is English. He also noted that it is easier these days to collaborate across languages thanks to ChatGPT and translation tools, but it still happens that some users do not communicate in English well, and that makes it harder to understand their needs.

The rest of VimConf 2024

VimConf was first held in 2013 by the Japanese Vim user group vim-jp. Since then, the group has organized it every year, until 2020 when VimConf was canceled due to COVID. After a hiatus, it resumed in 2023 with a scaled-down version. The full-fledged edition returned to Akihabara, Tokyo on November 23, 2024.

Even though most of the organizers and attendees are Japanese, VimConf strives to be welcoming to all. Presentation materials are expected to be in English, and live translation is provided in both Japanese and English for keynotes and regular presentations, except for lightning talks. PDFs for the talks are available on VimConf's website, and all of the talks are now on YouTube.