In Memoriam: Bram Moolenaar (UPDATED)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 06, 2023,
updated Aug 08, 2023

• Joe Brockmeier: :w gnu_bram_moolenaar.md

  Just learned this morning that Bram Moolenaar, creator and maintainer of Vim, passed away recently at 62. I’ve been a user of Vim since my 20s, so even though I’ve never met Bram his work has been an important part of my life.

  I’ve already written about how I got started with Vim a while back, so I won’t rehash that here. Suffice to say that I’ve spent a lot of time in Vim since 1999 when I got started with it.

  At a conservative estimate, I’ve written more than 2.5 million words in Vim in my career. (Some of them about Vim, too.) That’s a conservative estimate, as Vim was my primary editor throughout my freelance writing and editing career. It’s also been my go-to for first drafts long after I switched to Google Docs for most of my collaborative work.

• Mourning Bram Moolenaar

  Bram Moolenaar, the creator of the vim editor, passed away on August 3. "Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of." He will be missed.

UPDATE:

• Steinar H. Gunderson: RIP Bram Moolenaar

  It was with surprise that I learned that Bram Moolenaar, author of the Vim editor, had died two days ago. I cannot say we were ever friends, but I sat next to Bram for a year or so in the Google Zurich office and learned to recognize his ways and his work in Google (he worked on, among others, autocorrecting searches in Google Apps). He didn't talk much about Vim (not to me, anyway), but even at work, he kept up his life-long advocacy of the ICCF charity, helping children in Uganda.

Short one:

• Goodbye, Bram Moolenaar ♡

It's FOSS News:

• Farewell to a Legend: Creator of Vim, Bram Moolenaar, Passed Away

  Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, has passed away.

  The news was conveyed by a family member who shared that Bram passed away on 3 August 2023, following a prolonged battle with a medical condition that had rapidly progressed over the past few weeks.

The Register:

• RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

  Obit Dutch free software developer Bram Moolenaar has died. He was 62. His Vim text editor is probably one of the single most widely used Linux programs of all time.

  His family on Saturday announced his passing, appropriately enough on the Vim-announce mailing list. It has resulted in an outpouring of grief across many techie forums and some moving tributes. Moolenaar was a private man, known to the world mainly through his work.

  Vim was not the only program he wrote, but it was certainly the most widely known. A core part of the Unix credo is that everything is a file – and specifically, in most cases, it's a text file. And text editors are among the most important core parts of any Unix-like operating system.