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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,