What Happens to Vim After Bram Moolenaar’s Passing? Inside the Project’s Future Plans

When Vim’s creator Bram Moolenaar passed away on August 3, 2023, the open‑source community faced the question of what would happen to the project without its long‑time benevolent dictator for life.

Bram had been the sole maintainer of Vim, and his death left a significant leadership vacuum that concerned many users and contributors.

Discussions on the Vim GitHub Discussions page and the vim_dev mailing list revealed community worries about who could continue the project’s development and governance.

Two long‑time core developers, Christian Brabandt (a solutions consultant at Ataccama) and Ken Takata, have now obtained administrative access to the Vim GitHub organization from Bram’s family and are inviting former contributors to help maintain the project.

However, they face several challenges:

Bram owned all mailing lists, and the new maintainers are still figuring out how to manage or gain access to lists such as vim‑announce and vim‑mac .

The vim‑dev, vim‑use, and other lists are currently managed by a small group of volunteers, some of whom may no longer be active.

Access to the main Vim FTP server is still pending, and they are contacting the family for credentials.

They are reaching out to runtime file maintainers to ensure no essential files are lost.

Christian noted that, until these issues are resolved, the team will need time to adopt better processes.

Planned releases : After clearing the backlog, the team intends to publish a maintenance version of Vim 9.1, followed by incremental patch releases.

Vim vs. Neovim : The new maintainers are considering adopting a more modern development approach similar to Neovim, but they recognize potential impacts on sub‑projects such as the Windows installer, AppImage, and macVim. The Neovim team has stated that while Neovim is a fork, it aims to preserve important Vim concepts without replacing Vim entirely.

Community sentiment varies; some hope for closer collaboration between Vim and Neovim, while others remain skeptical about merging the two ecosystems.

Website migration : The Vim homepage has suffered stability issues, especially with its MySQL backend hosted on OSDN.net (now owned by OSChina). Christian is exploring moving the site to a different provider and has previously discussed open‑sourcing the site with Bram, who was hesitant due to security concerns.

When an open‑source maintainer can no longer lead a project, several outcomes are possible:

Community‑driven maintenance by active contributors.

Formal hand‑over to a core team or organization.

Forking the project to create a new independent version.

Establishing a donation fund or foundation to support development.

Leaving the project unchanged until someone steps up.

Despite the challenges, the involvement of developers like Christian Brabandt offers hope that Vim will continue to evolve and serve its users.