Personal Anecdote: When I was first getting started in software I was very much part of the "I can think faster than I type" school and I had the good fortune to fall in with some really serious hackers, one of whom was an absolute wizard with `vim`. He was a very humble guy, so it was some time before I learned he was in no small part such a `vi` pro because he had written a real vi , it was called `xvi` and I gathe…
Bram Moolenaar has died
351–360 of 449 posts
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#352Even if I use neovim (some great plugins) there are better modals out there now (helix is cool but I hate some of the differences from Vim) Vim is the editor.
Vim is how I type. Vim is how I code. Vim is how I think.
Made a donation to ICCF in Bram's honour today. It will not be the last.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#353I am such a huge fan of Vim that I ran a Vim blog and posted daily tips for several years (will not mention it by name because I do not want to self-promote in this thread). I don't have much to say besides the fact that I feel like we've lost a "giant" in the open source world, and Bram's contributions as a software engineer, and more importantly, a fantastic human being, will not be forgotten. :help uganda
Could mention the site in profile btw. Afaik it's common/good practice to have some sort of way to get to a contact method in one's profile
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel it's much more common to create abstractions without regard for performance cost of the abstraction. So keeping time complexity down, even for a piece that doesn't matter much, is above average for this sort of thing.
Creating abstractions without considering performance is probably the correct approach. It’s much better to at least start with a program with enough abstraction to allow reasoning about how things should work. Save performance concerns for when optimization is seen to be necessary.
Hard disagree. Abstractions are nice when they match the mental model of a problem domain, but the odds you have the right set of abstract primitives in mind from the outset is practically 0.
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#355For anyone looking to learn Vim, this is an educational game that's actually pretty fun: https://vim-adventures.com/
See also https://old.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/lbjw3u/good_guides_on_...
It was the 'IRC style tutorial' ( https://www.vi-improved.org/irc-style-tutorial/ ) which helped make it click for me. (I feel like that was a lot longer ago than the publish date of 2016).
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#356Sharing a piece of advice Bram gave to me once: " It appears you think that everybody is like you. But that's not so. " I didn't take the advice well at the time, but now, a little older and wiser, I understand. Thank you, Bram. Thank you for vim, for your time and dedication, and for taking the time to deposit a small amount of your wisdom into my brain. Sorry for being a dick.
It's a hard piece of advice to make use of. I couldn't say whether I assume everyone is like me or not: it really depends on what we're talking about.
Are you okay with sharing what it was about concretely? That may be more of a takeaway, to learn in which way people aren't all alike, than the general statement that not everyone's the same
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#357[deleted]
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#358I don't remember when I found vim or how, but I emailed myself the vim book download link 19 years ago[1]. I've installed it at work on my Windows machines, tried to convince coworkers to use it, enthused about it online, played https://www.vimgolf.com/ , answered a few vim questions on Stack Exchange sites, and recognised Bram Moolenaar's name for years from the splash screen.
RIP.
[1] http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/doc/book/vimbook-OPL.pdf
[ There are only three names which have been deeply burned into my memory from splash screens; Bram Moolenaar from Vim, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi from Gravity Wars which I played as a kid https://archive.org/details/GravityWars_1020 ( https://ia802805.us.archive.org/16/items/5_Plus_One_-_Gunshi... )) and H. Peter Anvin from Linux boot screen / SYSLINUX https://i.stack.imgur.com/H3emX.jpg ]
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#359In the realm of text editors, Vim has been my unwavering companion for 25 years. It has become an integral part of my daily existence, an inseparable bond that defies the imagination of life without its embrace.
Farewell Bram!
Re: Bram Moolenaar has died
#360I remember the moment I decided to be a vimmer. I was in my first systems class in college, looking for advice. A senior asked me if I knew how to use vim, and with a few flicks of his wrists, split his screen into halves, quarters. I was sold.
I still wonder about what I encountered in that moment - a kind of honesty and stubbornness to build something true, universal, empowering. The restraint and confidence it takes, then, to present it as a blank canvas for all to build on.
Because vim exists, I know it is possible to build in that spirit; I will always strive to do so myself.