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There’s no future to Vim without Bram. A merge of the two fork’s isn’t what Bram has wanted, but it’s the best way to keep Vim alive

oblio 3y ago
I wouldn't be so dismissive. Vim is a marquee project, tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's cool or because they want to have that name on their CV.
- krossitalk 3y ago
  Pretty much this. I'd like to take a crack at updating that vim.org page away from PHP5/MySQL.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's cool It's one thing to contribute a couple of PRs/patches, a very different thing to spend a large part of your free time on the project for years (which is what Bram did to make vim what it is). These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it.
  - ftaghn 3y ago
    > These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it. Those same contributors that remained on vim instead of neovim didn't put much effort into vim9 ecosystem either. I can't imagine them being willing to maintain all of vim's baggage when literally nobody writes vim9script. Classic vimmers tend to stick to the old vimscript. As you said, contributing a few patches to classic vim is one thing, but becoming an actual maintainer of the behemoth that comes with a ton of useless baggage is a whole another thing. Maintaining a programming language no one uses.. sisyphus would be proud.
GneissFrog 3y ago
No future for Vim without Bram? People said the same thing about Apple when Steve Jobs passed away. Turns out, as long as you have loyal users and competent people working, things can keep on chugging right along. It seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss reunification when you don't even know what kind of compromises might be made to make it happen.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  I would not be so prompt to compare the situation with Apple and Jobs. Apple is a company that provides something no one else does while also holding a lock on its users. You can't go and install iOS apps on android. On the other hand, vim and neovim are almost the same thing, and wherever they diverge, it is always to the detriment of vim. I would not be very optimistic for the future of vim considering that nobody uses vim9script and that alone is quite the massive baggage to maintain, an entirely separate, new programming language? one that is used by.. no one? 99% of extension developers either use the old vimscript or lua, and neovim's lua base has significantly grown to the point where we can imagine a future that has no vimscript. Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base when it has this kind of really big, really useless baggage? and if they were to cut it out of the code base, would it still be vim? I respect Bram for his contribution to open source, and vim is one of my favorite, most used software, but his decisions in the past few years have been extremely poor and were not friendly toward the possibility of vim being community maintained.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base the same place where neovim found its developers. if one group of people can organize themselves to maintain and develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they can figure out how to move forward. finding new leadership can be difficult when there is no clear candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work on vim they would not have been there in the first place.
    - 3y ago
The_Colonel 3y ago
Time will tell, but I think vim is likely to fade away with slow development pace. People are all sentimental right now, but we'll see how many of them will remain in a couple of years still committing to vim daily. Looking at the commit history, vim was largely a one-man show, I'm a bit skeptical about that changing basically overnight.
- Anthony-G 3y ago
  The commit history does not accurately reflect the contributions to the code-base. As I understand it, contributors would write and provide patches to Bram who would then commit the changes to the code-base.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Why would anyone amend the author in an open source project?
    - Anthony-G 3y ago
      From what I can tell the reason is that that’s the way it was always done. As I understand it, back in the days before there were distributed version control systems, Bram was the only one who could commit to the code-base so he would credit the actual author of a submitted patch in the commit message. He continued this practice after the Vim project moved to Mercurial (and Git). Related discussion: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554
      - imbnwa 3y ago
        Ah, thanks
      - Anthony-G 3y ago
        On reflection, it might have been clearer to have started my comment with: “Taken at face value by most modern users of Git, the commit history does not accurately reflect the contributions to the code-base”.
sigzero 3y ago
None of that is even remotely true.

oblio 3y ago

I wouldn't be so dismissive. Vim is a marquee project, tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's cool or because they want to have that name on their CV.

krossitalk 3y ago
Pretty much this. I'd like to take a crack at updating that vim.org page away from PHP5/MySQL.
The_Colonel 3y ago
> tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's cool It's one thing to contribute a couple of PRs/patches, a very different thing to spend a large part of your free time on the project for years (which is what Bram did to make vim what it is). These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  > These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it. Those same contributors that remained on vim instead of neovim didn't put much effort into vim9 ecosystem either. I can't imagine them being willing to maintain all of vim's baggage when literally nobody writes vim9script. Classic vimmers tend to stick to the old vimscript. As you said, contributing a few patches to classic vim is one thing, but becoming an actual maintainer of the behemoth that comes with a ton of useless baggage is a whole another thing. Maintaining a programming language no one uses.. sisyphus would be proud.

GneissFrog 3y ago

No future for Vim without Bram? People said the same thing about Apple when Steve Jobs passed away. Turns out, as long as you have loyal users and competent people working, things can keep on chugging right along. It seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss reunification when you don't even know what kind of compromises might be made to make it happen.

ftaghn 3y ago
I would not be so prompt to compare the situation with Apple and Jobs. Apple is a company that provides something no one else does while also holding a lock on its users. You can't go and install iOS apps on android. On the other hand, vim and neovim are almost the same thing, and wherever they diverge, it is always to the detriment of vim. I would not be very optimistic for the future of vim considering that nobody uses vim9script and that alone is quite the massive baggage to maintain, an entirely separate, new programming language? one that is used by.. no one? 99% of extension developers either use the old vimscript or lua, and neovim's lua base has significantly grown to the point where we can imagine a future that has no vimscript. Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base when it has this kind of really big, really useless baggage? and if they were to cut it out of the code base, would it still be vim? I respect Bram for his contribution to open source, and vim is one of my favorite, most used software, but his decisions in the past few years have been extremely poor and were not friendly toward the possibility of vim being community maintained.
- em-bee 3y ago
  Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base the same place where neovim found its developers. if one group of people can organize themselves to maintain and develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they can figure out how to move forward. finding new leadership can be difficult when there is no clear candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work on vim they would not have been there in the first place.
  - 3y ago

The_Colonel 3y ago

Time will tell, but I think vim is likely to fade away with slow development pace. People are all sentimental right now, but we'll see how many of them will remain in a couple of years still committing to vim daily. Looking at the commit history, vim was largely a one-man show, I'm a bit skeptical about that changing basically overnight.

Anthony-G 3y ago
The commit history does not accurately reflect the contributions to the code-base. As I understand it, contributors would write and provide patches to Bram who would then commit the changes to the code-base.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Why would anyone amend the author in an open source project?
  - Anthony-G 3y ago
    From what I can tell the reason is that that’s the way it was always done. As I understand it, back in the days before there were distributed version control systems, Bram was the only one who could commit to the code-base so he would credit the actual author of a submitted patch in the commit message. He continued this practice after the Vim project moved to Mercurial (and Git). Related discussion: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554
    - imbnwa 3y ago
      Ah, thanks
    - Anthony-G 3y ago
      On reflection, it might have been clearer to have started my comment with: “Taken at face value by most modern users of Git, the commit history does not accurately reflect the contributions to the code-base”.

sigzero 3y ago

None of that is even remotely true.