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Vim after Bram: a core maintainer on how they've kept it going

What happens when the chief maintainer of an open source project dies. Maintaining VIM turned out to be a full time job, though the community has stepped in to help.

The service hosting their home page was acquired by Open Source China in July of 2023, and soon began serving visitors database errors, while support tickets went unanswered. “This was fine in the ’90s and maybe early 2000s,” Brabandt said, but “Nowadays I think people typically just download everything from GitHub or from the home page!” The Dutch Unix User Group was also reluctant to give Brabrandt access, and “It’s fine…” he said, “because we then decided to retire the old FTP server. (“I’m not sure how Bram did it in the past,” Brabandt says, and “the other people from the ICCF weren’t able to tell me!”) But in reality, it turns out that most of the new enhancement requests and issues are already coming from other sources like GitHub and Vim’s own to-do list.

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