Vim was a big part of my life

:e a-sad-email.md

I opened MacVim to tell a personal story.

The year was 1998, I was 15. I told my dad I wanted to go to a certification program. It’s something familiar in Brazil; you have high school courses and earn a certificate in parallel. I was inclined to study Chemistry (I really enjoyed the subject back then), but someone had suggested Informatics, and it looked promising. One problem: I didn’t have a computer and had no money to buy one. My dad said: “choose that one; we’ll figure it out.”

So, my father spent all money from his 13th paycheck (that’s a Brazilian thing: salary is paid monthly, and at the end of the year, we receive an extra 13th payment) to buy me a slow computer from a generic brand. My father bought my computer on December 29th, which arrived on December 31st. That computer got fried after a few months, and the replacement (under warranty) couldn’t play audio for more than a few minutes without freezing. Anyway, I was thrilled with my new computer, and I would be able to study. It ran Windows 98. The following year I got my hands on a copy of Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS, and I was happy learning to code.

So, in 1999, I was in my first year learning to code in C++ when I heard about Linux. Cool! Except that I had no idea where to get it. Then one day, I was walking to the bus stop to take the bus home when I saw a magazine with a Linux CD. I counted my money, I didn’t have enough to buy the magazine and take the bus, so I just went home. After lunch, my mother told me she had to go downtown to run some errands, I asked her if she could buy that magazine for me, and she agreed! Boy, I was happy. When she got home, I was so excited that I devoured that magazine. Then it was time to install Linux. I could either use fdisk to partition my hard drive but lose everything or fips and try to do a non-destructive splitting. Of course, let’s use FIPS. Except that I had no idea what I was doing, I made a mistake and wiped out my hard drive with Windows. Cool, cool, cool. Let’s learn Linux.

OK… how can I get the graphical interface to work? Oh, I need to edit some files. How can I edit files? There’s this editor here; it’s called vi. I learned how to use vi. Of course, it took me several days to figure everything out. It wasn’t as simple as opening duckduckgo.com and looking for an answer. I couldn’t ask ChatGPT either. But eventually, I learnt how to use vi, how to get X working, how to code in an editor and compile with GCC without the help of an IDE (the tool I used before, Turbo C++, was an IDE, although rudimentary). And, of course, I soon discovered Vim, much more powerful than vi.

When I got into college, I met some Emacs users. I tried Emacs, but my mind got used to the modal nature of Vim and I developed muscle memory in Vim shortcuts. When I got an internship at IBM, I tried to use Eclipse with a Python plugin, but I gave up and switched back to Vim.

At my first full-time job after college, I was such a Vim advocate that when a new developer asked in her hiring interview if she could use Vim, my boss returned saying he had just interviewed a female me, and she had already got a nickname before joining. After she joined the institute, we quickly bonded over that incident and became good friends.

Fast forward a few years, I wanted to get a tattoo, and so did she. “Let’s write something.” “What?” “:wq” “OK, that’s it!” And that’s how I got my only tattoo, a :wq on my wrist.

By the way, after a long Vim session, I cannot use Microsoft Excel. I type in a cell and immediately hit escape, which cancels what I had just typed. My hands move on their own.

When I bought my first MacBook, I continued using Vim. And I also discovered MacVim, a nice GUI on top of Vim. Given that macOS (OS X back then) uses the command key for shortcuts, MacVim ends up supporting both standard macOS shortcuts without messing with Vim shortcuts. For example, you can paste with command-V. The same wouldn’t be possible on Windows or Linux because control-V is already mapped to visual selection on Vim. When Björn Winckler needed someone to help generate builds for older macOS versions, I volunteered. Later, when Björn stepped down, I stepped up to maintain MacVim for a while, but I mostly integrated other people’s patches. But soon, I passed the baton to two other active devs, Sakamoto Kazuki (splhack) and Josh Petrie (jpetrie).

The first thing I do every time I get a new computer is downloading MacVim, Neovim (I use both) and my configuration files.

Vim has been my partner in coding for a long time. I’ve been a Vim user since 1999. Recently I worked with a developer born in 2000, I have used Vim for longer than he is alive.

So, when I opened my email, and I saw that message, I was sad. Bram changed the careers of so many of us. And the lives of many more, Vim was the first charityware I used. Bram didn’t ask for money for himself. He worked on Vim for free almost daily for 30 years. He only asked to donate to ICCF Holland to help children in Uganda.

r/linux, r/programming, r/vim, Hacker News, Slashdot, every programmer forum you go you read how Vim impacted the life of someone or, better yet, how someone recalls interacting with Bram and how nice he was.

Vim will continue, and Bram’s legacy will live.

And please donate to ICCF or any other charity organisation.

:wq

Photo by the author