Textbook of Linux

1961–2023 — Creator of Vim; advocate for ICCF Holland

Also known as: Moolenaar

Bram Moolenaar wrote Vim — "Vi IMproved" — in 1988 for his Amiga, missing the vi he had used at university. Over the next thirty-five years he shepherded it into the most widely used modal editor in the world, adding multi-level undo, syntax highlighting for hundreds of languages, scripting via Vim script and later Python and Lua, and the extensive plugin ecosystem.

Vim was released as charityware: free to use, but Moolenaar asked users to donate to his Dutch charity supporting children in Uganda, ICCF Holland. The request is still built into Vim's startup message (:help uganda).

He also led the Vim-development community with patience and care, accepting contributions without giving up design control. When he died in August 2023, aged 62, the announcement came from his family — there was no succession plan, and the Vim project has since been continued by a committee of long-time contributors. Vim's modern fork Neovim (2014) had already taken a different direction toward Lua-first scripting, but the two communities remained largely friendly.